They provide support in the background in the planning, implementation and completion of projects and thus make a significant contribution to their success: Project service providers help companies with small and large projects and offer professional services in a variety of areas. The day-to-day work of project service providers is complex: customer acquisition, communication of offers, project planning, operational implementation, accounting, cost planning - and that is just an excerpt from the multitude of topics that project service providers deal with on a daily basis. What helps you to keep track? A customer relationship management (CRM) system. Find out in this article what is meant by this, what advantages such a CRM brings for project service providers and how you can tell that you need a CRM.
What is a CRM?
A CRM – short for Customer Relationship Management – is a platform filled with lots of data: information about customers, about conversations you have had with them, about individual customer needs, deals that you have already done with them. In short, all important customer data is stored in the CRM.
The goal of CRM: building, maintaining, analyzing and deepening customer relationships in order to develop long-term and loyal customers. As a project service provider, you can achieve higher sales, offer better customer service and gain a competitive advantage.
To this end, CRM systems organize and document all important customer data, of course strictly in accordance with data protection guidelines. And they enable automated interaction with customers. In this way, individual, structured and timely communication with customers can take place.
Information must therefore also be stored centrally and processes must be transparent in order to be able to provide all data in the event of a report at any time - reliably and completely. Sales also needs a reliable, consistently documented data source when communicating with customers.
More than data – CRM can also do project documentation
When integrating with the Microsoft Unified Platform and here, for example, teams, the project service provider can collect all data in one place, which he or she and the entire team can access at any time.
Through the integration, the process from project planning to commercial project execution can become visible. This includes for example:
- Customer contacts
- Time recording
- Hourly rate calculation depending on project performance
- invoicing
- contact history
- management of acquisition
Six reasons for a project service provider CRM
But how do I, as a project service provider, know that it's time for my own customer relationship management system? The following six signs indicate that you as a project service provider can work more efficiently and profitably with a CRM.
- You want grow profitably?
A CRM system can help you drive growth. Because it gives you the opportunity to react better to customer needs, to cultivate and maintain customer relationships.
- They want yours Productivity and / or Efficiency increase?
Manual processes that use numerous spreadsheets and shuffle papers are painfully slow. A CRM system automates data entry and routine tasks so teams no longer work in cluttered information silos. This achieves improved efficiency in all areas.
- You want better as a team work together?
A CRM system gives everyone involved a central insight into the life cycle of every customer and prospective customer or lead, so that employees know exactly which actions have taken place and how they can continue working with the respective contacts. In addition, CRMs often have collaboration features such as file sharing and team dashboards.
- You want Transparency create?
A CRM system is a centralized database that logs every single interaction with customers or leads. As a project service provider, you can see which interactions have already taken place in a project. Thanks to the transparent documentation of this data, you can also provide evidence of all important data to your customers, eg time calculations for daily rate calculations.
- You want your customers to be better understand?
A CRM system will help you better understand your customers by using built-in reporting and data analytics. These tools give you a much deeper understanding of your target group and their needs and preferences.
- You want that Customer satisfaction increase?
With the help of the data from the CRM system, you can address your customers in a more targeted and personalized way. During project management, you also have a full overview with the help of the CRM - deadlines are met better, invoices are sent at the right time and the customer experiences a consistent project process with you as the project service provider.
A CRM system relieves the everyday work of project service providers enormously and increases productivity, effectiveness, customer satisfaction and cooperation. It is therefore advisable for project service providers to invest in a good CRM system. For example in Kumavision: a holistic and fully integrated CRM system that is specially tailored to the needs of project service providers.
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