Satisfied customers, suppliers and business partners are the cornerstone of successful companies. However, high customer satisfaction is no coincidence: in order to establish successful and up-to-date customer relationship management, forward-looking companies rely on CRM systems (customer relationship management systems).
An efficient digital CRM orchestrates practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to efficiently manage and analyze data and customer interactions along the entire customer lifecycle.
Benefit from PTA IT Consulting’s expertise in CRM and take your customer management to a new level.
Our experienced team consists of well-versed experts who offer you customized solutions for your customer relationship management.
We help you choose the CRM software provider that best suits your needs and are at your side from the initial concept to long-term support.
Together we will optimize your customer relationship management.
Customer Relationship Management
CRM system - customer management software for your success
The modern CRM system: your opportunity to optimize your corporate strategy in a customer-oriented way
The aim of CRM is to systematically acquire new customers, business partners and suppliers and to expand existing customers.
Customer relationship management always focuses on the stakeholders. For example, a modern CRM system provides information on the challenges a customer faces and how these can be solved, what benefits a company provides or how a customer, supplier or business partner wants to be addressed. A CRM system also provides insights into how customers perceive a company as a preferred supplier and which factors are decisive for this. The possible uses of a powerful CRM suite are almost limitless. A CRM system can be used profitably in all industries, enhancing the customer experience in both the B2B and B2C sectors. By integrating multiple channels into a central CRM system, companies can achieve omnichannel customer service and thus a seamless customer experience. This gives service employees a detailed overview of a customer’s interactions and enables them to respond to concerns, questions or complaints more effectively and efficiently.
Targeted customer management wins: companies replace outdated CRM systems
Customers expect appreciation and first-class service – otherwise they will quickly turn away. Close customer relationships are therefore playing an increasingly important role in a company’s business success – the formula for this is: customer care.
However, without a modern and powerful CRM system that bundles all important and relevant customer data in one central location and provides the Marketing, Sales, Client Service and Customer Care departments with precisely this data, comprehensive customer care is virtually impossible. And it may come as no surprise that, together with Statista, we found that around a third (29 percent) of companies are dissatisfied with their CRM system and want to replace it.
The reasons for this are manifold: the majority (58%) complain about the inadequate functionality of the system in use and around 40% are of the opinion that it is very difficult to adapt to the respective processes in the company.
As many as 27% criticize the lack of mobile use of the CRM system – an astonishing figure in the wake of advancing digitalization and the advent of hybrid working environments.
A quarter of companies state that they are now working with an outdated system and 23% see major weaknesses in the lack of flexibility of their CRM system as well as the problem that it can only be adapted to current market conditions with considerable effort.
What to look out for when implementing a CRM system
CRM systems are true all-rounders and offer numerous advantages for your company:
- you can increase your sales,
- enable professional contact management,
- optimize your sales pipeline,
- make it easier to capture new prospects,
- open up marketing measures tailored to the target group,
- improve your teams and
- provide you with user-friendly tools with which you can also analyze a wide range of acquired data.
However, a powerful CRM system is only as good as the users who use it. Many companies are faced with the major challenge of finding a suitable CRM solution that best meets the requirements of the company’s users.
After all, the possibilities of modern customer management software can only be fully exploited if there is a high level of user acceptance.
Our IT consultants provide you with comprehensive support in the selection and introduction of CRM systems. We provide you with comprehensive, vendor-independent advice: from requirements analysis and implementation through to operation and support of the optimum solution for your company. You benefit from our many years of IT expertise and in-depth process excellence, particularly in the areas of Sales & Service.
Install a CRM system with a 360° view of your customers
Together with you, we use tried and tested methods to evaluate the CRM software provider that is right for you.
In the first step, we always focus on your processes.
We use business process management to analyze and qualify the business processes in your company.
Business process management is also known as BPM or process management and, based on solutions such as process mining software, provides implementation concepts that enable a 360° view of your stakeholders and align your company in such a way that you optimally meet their individual requirements.
In this way, you not only achieve greater transparency along the value chain in your company. As a result, you will also achieve a better understanding and greater acceptance in your organization for the mapping and integration of central processes in the CRM system.
At the same time, you promote cross-departmental workflows by seamlessly integrating your CRM solution into other systems.
Our process experts are also on hand with advice and support when it comes to role concepts.
Together with you, we install complex authorization structures that ensure that your employees can use your CRM system correctly, i.e. that it is clearly defined who is provided with which data and in what form.
Because with clear structures, you can set up your team optimally throughout the company in order to exploit your full potential.
CRM systems: valuable support in many scenarios
The aim of implementing a CRM system is always to build and maintain long-term and profitable relationships with customers, suppliers or business partners.
The deployment scenarios are just as varied as the target groups addressed. To give you a brief overview, we have compiled the most important ones for you:
By using a CRM system, you can drive lead generation in your company and lay the foundations for increasing sales. This is because customer management software takes all the data and information obtained directly and assigns it to a stored address. The lead is at the beginning of the value creation process of a CRM solution. So the better you design your customer relationships or your customer journey, the more likely you are to win new customers and retain existing customers. A professional CRM system is a proven way to achieve this, as it stores data on the behaviour of email recipients, for example. This is ensured by so-called B2B website trackers, which de-anonymize website visitors and transfer them to the CRM software.
CRM systems can be used to target inbound mail campaigns via interfaces to marketing automation solutions.
As part of your lead nurturing, you further qualify the leads you have gained. Automated e-mail routes or telephone calls support you in this. If the lead criteria defined in the CRM system are met, you have gained a qualified lead. This significantly increases your chances of achieving a high conversion rate and converting leads into buyers.
The qualified contact is transferred to the sales process.
A modern CRM system consistently maps a previously defined sales process.
Using integrated CRM scenarios, all processes can be designed transparently: from making appointments, preparing quotations and tracking them, making phone calls and following up on customer satisfaction to supporting existing customers and expanding them in a targeted manner.
A powerful CRM solution measures the conversion rate described above, i.e. how many sales opportunities your sales team has passed on from one phase to the next. This allows you to plan and control the phases of your sales activities along the entire process cycle.
When customers use products or services, questions and problems usually arise. Service requests are inevitable. Many CRM systems therefore provide you with a workflow or process engine that can be used to map all service processes clearly and reliably.
This makes cross-departmental work much easier. What’s more, a modern CRM system overcomes departmental barriers.
Sales can see which service requests are currently open with your customers. Conversely, your service employees can see the sales activities in the customer’s contact history. This not only creates cross-channel transparency. You also benefit from end-to-end mapping of your contact-related business processes and a significant acceleration of your workflows.
Flexible adaptation of your CRM system to current developments
The use of a CRM system has always been data-driven. In this respect, customer relationship management is far more than just a software solution.
There are numerous application scenarios in the CRM ecosystem, the integration of which offers high added value and leads to a unique customer experience. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is one such scenario that brings benefits in numerous areas of customer relationship management. AI provides profitable support in the CRM environment and offers many options for improving service processes and understanding customers even better based on the customer data collected.
AI integration in CRM systems revolutionizes customer approach
Our consultants have realized a pioneering option with the development of our digital and interactive video consulting assistant NEXOVI, thus taking a further step towards expanding your omni-channel concept. This is because our digital and flexibly scalable advisory assistant is freely configurable and can be linked to a platform service if required.
In addition to advice and processing the video recording, this service also includes various tariffs, individual processes with direct contract conclusion and the automatic creation of advice documentation.
In short: with NEXOVI, the interactive video advice assistant, you can revolutionize your customer approach and benefit from the use of state-of-the-art AI technologies.
Targeted evaluation of data streams in integrated CRM scenarios
Large volumes of data in particular can be analyzed faster and better with a CRM system. With integrated CRM systems, you are able to use big data, such as data streams from the Internet of Things (IoT).
Sophisticated analytics functions(business intelligence) allow you to create detailed forecasts, optimize your offers or achieve considerable time savings by automating certain processes. The increased industry focus of the manufacturers enables you to select the right tools for you from a wide range of cloud-based tools. In this way, your organization wins more orders, increases your productivity and fills your pipeline with qualified leads. And by using flexible cloud solutions, you can also involve your business partners and suppliers in this process at the right points.
Turn your power users into CRM developers
Another current trend that can be easily mapped with a modern CRM system: In the course of the increasing shortage of skilled workers, Microsoft, for example, enables the individual further development of the CRM solution in its CRM suite via so-called Fusion Teams. A Fusion team is nothing more than a multidisciplinary team of developers, users and managers who use their specific areas of expertise and specialist knowledge to adapt the CRM suite to the company’s own requirements in the best possible way. By combining the team’s knowledge with the latest technology, Fusion Teams can deploy the CRM system faster and more efficiently. The counterpart at Salesforce and SAP is called Citizen Development.
Whether Fusion Team or Citizen Developer, what they have in common is that you can use no-code and low-code software platforms to create CRM applications for complex processes yourself.
You select modules from an on-screen library like a construction kit and drag them into a visual workflow. The specialist departments gain more room for maneuver and relieve the professional software developers, who only provide support in such scenarios.
Our solution portfolio and process knowledge for your optimal CRM system
Our IT consultants and process experts support you in selecting and implementing the CRM system that is best for you – from a single source, independent of manufacturer and with expert knowledge. At the start of a project, we always focus first on your processes and carry out a detailed requirements analysis together with you. Based on our many years of experience in the industry and our in-depth process knowledge, we lay a solid foundation.
Regardless of whether this involves the subsequent implementation of a new CRM system, the replacement of your legacy systems or a migration project – we are your competent partner when it comes to customer management software.
We always stay as close to the standard as possible and adapt the software where necessary.
With this tried-and-tested process model, you reduce the effort and costs of ongoing operation, support and quality assurance, which we can also offer you on request via our service and helpdesk.
The functional scope of a modern CRM system basically leaves nothing to be desired. The market leaders for digital CRM business platforms Microsoft, Salesforce and SAP rely on modular solutions that integrate IT solutions from your individual eco-system in addition to the classic application areas of sales, marketing, customer and field services (IoT scenarios). These include BI systems as well as central enterprise resource planning systems (ERP systems), but also collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, with which you can optimally integrate your employees, customers and partners. Many companies use the ERP suite from SAP to map their business processes. The largest European software manufacturer from Walldorf is continuously expanding its portfolio around this stable ERP core and offers seamless integration of its CRM system.
The solution’s omnichannel functions are deeply integrated into the SAP ecosystem and provide sales staff with the data and tools they need to optimize margins and strengthen customer loyalty.
The CRM market leaders score points with these features
In the course of the rapidly advancing digital transformation, companies need innovative applications and lean processes to keep pace. But in many places there is a shortage of specialists and the IT department itself is often the bottleneck. With the PowerPlatform, Microsoft gives everyone the option of developing solutions themselves to drive digitalization in the company. Here are the most important functions of PowerPlatform:
- Office 365, Dynamics 365, Dataverse and many other applications can be linked together.
This allows you to implement cross-application workflows and connect various applications without individually developed interfaces. - With Microsoft Power Apps, your Citizen Developers can develop their own apps independently thanks to a low-code/no-code user interface.
- Microsoft PowerBI offers the option of creating cross-application evaluations and analyses.
This allows you to provide your employees with meaningful and data-supported information to make well-founded decisions. - Dynamics 365 is a powerful CRM system that can be flexibly adapted and scaled even without professional programming knowledge.
- In future, ChatGPT will help to find emails relating to specific processes more quickly and support the creation of templates.
- By integrating ChatGPT into Teams, automatic meeting notes can be created and intelligent summaries generated.
These functions enable you to effectively shape the digital transformation and optimize your processes.
Salesforce Lightning – next level CRM system
Salesforce has ushered in a new evolutionary stage of CRM with Salesforce Lightning.
With an intuitive new design, more productivity tools and access to Einstein, a simplified AI-powered search, Lightning helps you focus your time and resources where they matter most. This not only increases your productivity, but also enables you to develop your applications faster and work more agilely and intelligently overall.
The new CRM system platform from Salesforce enables your IT department to create apps together with no-code builders and pro-code tools. This increases the efficiency of the sales and service team across the board. Thanks to the new functions integrated in Lightning, your sales team can design services for your stakeholders more easily and at the same time more individually. AI-supported sales tools enable you to drive your business forward and increase productivity. You can also simplify your day-to-day business by creating customized applications to automate business processes. Another advantage: Lightning provides a complete overview of the business activities of your marketing and sales teams with opportunity management.
You can easily create user-defined analyses on the Einstein analysis platform. For example, the user-defined analysis application supports you in identifying important trends or visualizing KPIs. In this way, you generate usable results for your company – regardless of the industry.
You are also able to implement partner applications and make insights available to the entire team using Einstein Analytics.
CRM systems are turbochargers for your sales
With a CRM system, you can manage all the contact details of your customers, business partners and suppliers in a structured and clear manner. They record interactions and collect all important information along the customer journey from lead to purchase. This speeds up communication and thus strengthens customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. Based on a targeted approach and optimal segmentation, you can fully exploit your cross-selling and upselling potential and increase your sales.
Without the support of a modern CRM system, it is no longer possible to manage the mass of data that is generated in this process today. Information is forgotten or lost due to employee turnover. If, on the other hand, all customer data is stored in a central CRM system, you gain transparency. All employees have access to the same information. This has advantages if a contact person is not available, but urgent information is needed immediately. This enhances the customer experience and you strengthen your customer relationships on the basis of fast and targeted information.
Accelerated business processes and fact-based decisions thanks to CRM system
Our CRM experts will support you in consulting, selecting and implementing the CRM solution that is best for you. With their support and seamless integration into your IT landscape, you can optimize your business processes, automate recurring routines and thus speed up your workflows. This not only brings competitive advantages. With a powerful CRM system that takes the pressure off your staff, you increase their satisfaction and user acceptance.
If you map your business processes on a workflow basis in a central CRM system, processes can be processed much faster. A centralized database makes collaboration between marketing, sales and service much easier. As everyone can access the customer data, processes and inquiries stored there, transparency increases. Your service and sales teams can see which marketing campaigns your customers are currently involved in. The sales department immediately recognizes open service requests and the service department the current sales opportunities. This helps you to better understand and assess your customers. This not only increases your productivity – an integrated CRM system also makes processes measurable on an ongoing basis, allowing them to be continuously optimized.
In short: a CRM system provides you with valuable fact-based data on the basis of which you can make reliable decisions. Analyses provide you with meaningful KPIs for sales management, such as conversion at every stage of your sales process. Weighted forecasts or the sales funnel can also be measured immediately. This allows decisions to be made on the basis of facts.
Bundling data from different sources and systems in the CRM system
In most cases, a powerful CRM system does not work independently. A CRM system develops its full strength when data from different source systems converge there. This could be data from ERP systems such as SAP S4/HANA or Microsoft Dynamics, for example, or from external supplier systems or business partners’ IT solutions. Together with you, we develop interfaces that ensure smooth data exchange. Our IT experts also develop and integrate individual interfaces to third-party systems.
As many companies already have contact data and information in various data sources, we identify these sources and decide together with our customers whether and, if so, which data needs to be transferred to the central CRM system. To ensure that this happens quickly and without errors, we work together to define a migration concept that regulates the transfer of legacy and existing data. After all, high data quality is key to the successful digitalization of your company.
CRM systems: our best practices
We are your reliable partner for the conception and introduction of a tailor-made CRM solution and are at your side with help and advice in all project phases – from in-depth process analysis and the implementation of an integrated CRM system to the realization of customized and highly specialized user interfaces (GUIs). To give you an idea of our proven solution expertise and in-depth process knowledge, here are some of our flagship projects:
360-degree view: individually tailored services for millions of customers
The Rhein-Main-Verkehrsverbund (RMV), one of the largest transport associations in Germany, has decided to use Microsoft Dynamics 365 and is relying on the IT experts from PTA as its implementation partner. Since then, RMV has been using a modern business suite that enables a high degree of automation of the process landscape. The PTA consultants managed to integrate the cloud solution into the transport association’s existing IT infrastructure via numerous interfaces and to adapt it precisely to RMV’s requirements by adding features such as countless transaction mails. Power BI can be used to run targeted evaluations and monitor campaigns and sales. This leads to transparent and efficient processes along the entire supply chain.
Seamless interaction between merchandise management and CRM system
Together with PTA IT-Beratung, beegy, a provider of complete solutions in the field of decentralized energy management, has introduced the ERP system Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The goal: to further optimize the processes in merchandise management and warehouse management.
The merchandise management system was connected to the CRM environment on the existing Microsoft Dynamic 365 platform. The cloud ERP solution thus enables access to the CRM system and vice versa. With this integration, beegy will be able to use and synchronize data from the other application in the future. For example, beegy sales employees can view the availability of a stored item in Dynamics 365 Sales when creating a quotation or sales order.
Customized CRM system for efficient and sustainable customer communication
Digitalization also opens up excellent opportunities for local energy suppliers: this is why Stadtwerke Neu-Isenburg is shaping its digital transformation with the IT experts from PTA. Digitization offers particular advantages in customer management. This is made particularly clear by the example of solar contracting: the municipal utilities lease complete solar systems – particularly practical for owners of detached or semi-detached houses who want to generate their own electricity. As a result, Stadtwerke Neu-Isenburg is optimizing its customer management with digital applications such as a CRM system. Since then, all processes have become more transparent and efficient. The main objective: full focus on customers and their needs.
Research our IT projects in the area of Customer Relationship Management
Important questions about CRM systems
What is a CRM system and why is it important?
A CRM system (CRM = Customer Relationship Management) is a software solution that supports companies in managing and optimizing customer relationships.
It enables the central storage of customer data, facilitates communication and improves the efficiency of customer care.
The advantages of an effective CRM system: it helps to strengthen customer loyalty, optimize sales processes and ultimately increase turnover.
What are the advantages of customer management software?
Customer management software offers numerous advantages.
The efficiency of customer relationship management is increased as all customer data is stored in one place and is easily accessible.
It also makes corporate communication more efficient by improving interaction with customers through automated processes and personalized communication.
Analyses and reports provide valuable insights into customer behavior and sales data, allowing informed decisions to be made.
Thanks to the automation of time-consuming tasks, productivity is increased, allowing your team to focus on core tasks.
How does a CRM system affect stakeholder relationships and the economic success of a company?
A CRM system can make a significant contribution to improving stakeholder relationships and the economic success of a company.
Through personalized and more efficient communication, customer needs can be better identified and fulfilled.
This strengthens customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Thanks to detailed analyses and reports, companies can also make better-informed decisions, which leads to more efficient use of resources and increased sales.
A CRM system also promotes transparency and the exchange of information within the company, which improves collaboration between different departments and cooperation with external partners.
In addition, administrative tasks are reduced thanks to automated processes and centralized data management.
This allows your employees to focus on strategically relevant tasks.
Our individual advice for your CRM system
A powerful CRM system is the key to long-term success and strong customer loyalty.
Benefit from our expertise in customer relationship management and customer management software – contact us and find out how our customized solutions can help your company.
Let’s optimize your stakeholder relationships together!
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