A New Way of Looking at the Customer Experience Through an Integrated ERP

Staying connected and keeping up with your customers is very important for keeping them happy and coming back. Distributors know this, and are constantly thinking of new and innovative ways to improve it. Believe it or not, your customers play a much needed role in advocating your company’s message and strength.

According to Jennifer Rosvally, director of marketing at DDI System, a leading software company providing fully integrated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions that include demand forecasting, warehouse operations, accounting, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and business analytics, a trend in newly created customer experience (CX) teams is emerging to help deliver guided client journeys managed with the thoughtful experience they deserve.

Account-based marketing efforts is the new expectation, setting wholesale distributors apart from any digital disruptions and competitors alike.

“The challenge is for distributors to tap into their ERP systems and harness the customer insight they could have available.  This ‘all-access’ look at buying habits, profiles and customer trends shapes conversations that drive customer engagement,” Rosvally says. “The beauty of this combination in an ERP software is that each and every person using the system is just as knowledgeable as the other — turning purchase managers into inventory control experts and service staff into customer engagement specialists.”

A well integrated CRM application within your ERP system can give distributors the confidence about their customers in three ways:

1. Customer Activity Awareness: Being aware of specific customer’s activity, such as purchase patterns and past orders, can help both sales and customer service come across as more familiar to customers.

2. Personal Profiles and Notes: The ability to easily access personal notes on individual customer profiles and obtain information on purchasing trends, allows distributors to personalize their customer service.

3. Easy Follow-up and Engagement: With the insight to customer activity, wholesale distributors can leverage powerful analysis tools to strategically price customers, reassign selling resources, and guide marketing efforts.

Easily accessible contact screens serve as an extremely powerful, analytic tool to improve customer relationships. Rosvally argues that the ultimate customer experience is orchestrated by the ability to see customer purchase patterns, history, and personal notes, like where they like to vacation or their hobbies, amplifying engagement on a much more personal level and better than any online shopping experience.

Distributors should continue to cater to their customers, ensuring that their expectations are met and even exceeded. Selecting an ERP system with an embedded CRM simplifies this process tenfold.

“Bridging the gap between a system that optimizes business operations and a system that provides customer engagement and relationship management is critical to growth. Inform ERP meets the needs of wholesale distributors with an integrated solution that improves customer retention, raise customer service levels, and take advantage of robust customer relationship management tools,” Rosvally adds.

Looking for more? Download our ERP Buyer’s Guide for free to compare the top 24 ERP software vendors head to head! The guide also includes 4 key capabilities to consider while selecting a new ERP solution and 10 questions to ask yourself and the software vendor before purchasing.

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