Your ERP not only allows you to be more efficient and more effective, it allows you to do things you could not do without it. For example, you can use the data in your ERP to create a better user experience, which can not only improve customer satisfaction, but can increase customer engagement and increase revenue. Here are a few ways to use your ERP data to engage your customers:
- Give customers self-service access to their order history, order status, project status, invoices, and payment history through a customer portal. This not only reduces your customer support staff hours but increases customers’ satisfaction as they can find the information they need without having to connect with a service rep via telephone, chat, or email. You might also give customers access to a knowledge base as a self-selected first line of support. This shows you are addressing issues your customers have as well as giving your customers the opportunity to answer questions and proceed on their own.
- Provide customers with metrics. It is a good start to supply them with metrics about their own company and its interaction with your company, but you can do better. You can also provide aggregate metrics for your customer base and industry metrics. So for instance, if you are a distributor to the food service industry, you can provide a metric that shows the ratio of pasta to sauce that your customer purchased. You can also show the same metric for your customer base and for the industry. This may tempt your customer to change its purchase ratio, increasing its total purchase. Even though this particular customer does not purchase canned mushrooms, you might show the ratio of mushrooms to sauce that your aggregate customer base buys. This may entice your customer to start buying mushrooms as well. You might also show the average cost per gallon the customer is paying and the average cost for your customer base and the industry as a total. If this customer is paying more, seeing that others pay less might entice it to purchase bigger volumes for volume discounts. Seeing that the aggregate customer base pays less than the industry average may confirm with the customer that it is purchasing from the right vendor.
- Use your ERP customer portal for customer collaboration. Ask for input on project status from the customer viewpoint and provide a platform for suggestions for process improvements within the project. If you notice a trend of some sort, use the portal to transmit this information via a dashboard and question causes.
In order to drive adoption and really provide value that can be monetized, you need to provide customer-driven information and services, not just information that you think will push product. You can get ideas of what information your customer needs by talking to your customer service reps, your sales reps, and your customers themselves. Additional sales through upsell and cross-sell “suggestions” will increase your bottom line and the customer engagement will increase your band awareness and loyalty.
Acumatica Cloud-based ERP includes a customer portal in its Customer Management Suite along with sales, marketing, service, and reporting tools that enable you to manage the customer experience through your portal. For more information about how Acumatica can help your business, call the Cloud-based ERP consultants at NexVue at 203.327.0800 or email us at info@nexvue.com or simply click here for a Contact Us form.
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By Sandi Richards Forman, NexVue Information Systems, sforman@nexvue.com
