iZeno:

Since the inception of globalisation, manufacturing companies, like yours, scales marketing to end customers through a network of dealers operating in the local market. Today, the market is again disrupted by the rise of e-commerce platforms, enabling you to connect directly to your customers. This attempt to maximise your market presence, either through dealers or direct creates an opportunity to manage relationships and workflow to give clarity in complex operational process and maintain common goals.

Today, we shall explore the critical roles of CRM in your Manufacturing Company that includes:

  1. Marketing
  2. Opportunity management and POC/R&D
  3. Customer Service
  4. Dealer Management

Marketing/Lead Generation

A good CRM enable options to generate lead via various channels:

  1. Email Marketing
  2. Web 2 Lead usually Contact Us/Request for Quote option on the website
  3. Trade/Events
  4. Leads generated from the Dealers/Partners

Your Marketing/Sales personnel will touch base and know the requirements of prospect/lead once the lead generated. As a follow-up activity, your marketing personnel can send product brochure.

Opportunity Management and POC/R&D

When Lead is converted into Opportunity, it triggers a Sales Cycle, designated based on the product opted by your customer. Customer may be looking for Standard Product Configuration or Custom Configurations to meet his/her requirements.

In the case of Custom Configurations, there may be a need to Generate POC/Sampling/R&D which can have multiple levels of approval.

When Lead is converted into Opportunity, it triggers the designated Sales Cycle Process based on the product opted by the customer. Under unique circumstances, your customer may be looking for Standard Product Configuration or Custom Configurations to meet his/her requirements.

In the case of Custom Configurations, there may a need to Generate POC/Sampling/R&D which can have multiple levels of approval.

Once the approval is received, the system shall prompt Schedule to be finalised, and finally, the Opportunity will move to POC/R&D stage. When the POC completed and Opportunity concluded, the final proposal will be submitted for customer approval.

Customer Service

The essential support services offered by a manufacturing companies to its customers are as follows:

  1. Pre-Installation Services
  2. commissioning Services
  3. Break Down Servces
  4. Spares Support
  5. Value Added Services
  6. AMC

Let us look at how CRM can help you at some of these Services offerings:

Pre-Installation Services

For the Pre-installation Team, there are some predefined set of Steps/Checklist that can be managed in CRM. In SugarCRM particularly, these are achieved by using “Customer Journey/Pre-Installation Checklist”. Refer to our checklist instance below:

At every stage, CRM tracks and notify if these checklists have been applied to minimise your machine downtime or errors.

Spares Services

Availability of spares is critical to optimise your customer support practicality. During the process of fulfilment, your employees will be equipped with  spares inventory management, collaboratively from ERP and CRM. CRM helps in locating the Spares required to fulfil specific customer demand, and the ERP provide details to location nearest to the customer site. This ability to provide immediate view of spares availability, allows the support agent/team to set proper expectation with the customer.

Annual Maintenance Contract (AMC)

AMC is sold to the customer when the Warranty/Additional warranty has expired. In our scenario, AMC is sold by the Sales Team and execution is done by the Support Team.

CRM provides predefined steps to be followed by the Sales team for AMC Sales Opportunities.

The scope contains the following items and are managed as part of the AMC Module. CRM provide predefined Template and Generate a contract document (PDF) along with commercials.

Planning and scheduling maintenance activity

CRM provides Scheduling features, wherein the maintenance activities are available on the Calendar. The schedules can be auto-assigned to Subject matter expert/technicians based on the Skill Set. Additionally, the system helps to generate the Job-Sheet which will contain the previous Service History and the details about part replacements.

Maintaining records and analysis

SugarCRM Reports provides operational reports. Some of the reports are

  1. SLA report
  2. Part replacement report
  3. KPI report

KPI report provides information related to First-Time Completion, Time to Complete and Cases customer follow-up.

Dashboard

VP of Support allows daily monitoring of various support related reports in real time.

Dealer Management

Our last important features to CRM for Manufacturing includes Dealer Management, wherein the Dealer can manage his Leads, Opportunities, and Support via his login into the portal.

Picture this, the dealer who submits his leads via the Dealer portal and on the other end, you as the vendor, can assist your dealer to close the Lead in a shorter sales cycle.  Your dealer is able to provide customer support via the Support portal and manage the SLA based on the Agreement signed with the customer. All in one place, so that you can maintain collaborative and value added relationship with the your dealers and simplify your go-to market time.

To summarise, CRM becomes a mission-critical application to manage customer services, and with ERP integration, your sales and support personnel can utilise complete details on the customer, such as Pending Orders, Payments, and Support requests in one view, thus improving the quality of services offered to the customer.

Check Also:

The Core CRM Features every organization needs – Customer Service and Support 

How CRM affects customer experience

Customer Service: turning transactions into relationships

Five Reasons Organizations Resist Using CRM, and How to Overcome Them