Top tech tasks that should be outsourced

[LeadMaster]

I came across an article called 10 tech tasks small businesses should outsource. The top three tasks were 1. Infrastructure 2. Cloud hosting 3. Customer relationship management (CRM).

I thought it was interesting that CRM was number three. Corresponding with customers in a strategic manner is becoming more and more important as customers are surfing social media sites and checking their emails more frequently. Has your business implemented a CRM system?

 

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[AmyQ]

Yes, we use Netsuite for our CRM. It is the foundation of our marketing, analytics and customer service.

Using it allows us to send targeted campaigns and email promotions to clients based on sales history and other data. For example, we can run are report that will find every customer who spend $X Tuesday and send them a discount/email campaign/offer in a matter of minutes.

We also use the information in it to analyze sales data. If I want to know the percentage of customers that used a promotion we sent out and how much they purchased, we can create a report that will give me us that information nearly instantly. Great feedback loop to find out what your customers respond to and then give it to them quickly.

The customer service component is a useful feature as well. If someone sends an email to our cs department, it shows up in our CRM and the employee replying can can see every dollar the customer has spent, what products they bought, what campaigns we have sent them, which ones they responded to and a record of every prior contact with customer service.

One thing though is that getting your data out of Netsuite is nearly impossible. Not sure I would go with them if I had a time machine. They essentially have us by the balls since it would cause so much friction to change to another CRM, but there are lots of options out there with the same features.