On the surface, technological solutions empower employees with immediate access to insights that help them make informed decisions. Inwardly, constantly alternating between stand-alone applications wastes employees’ time. These siloed applications also risk multiple data entries that result in inaccurate or inaccessible data.

When employees use faulty data to gain insight into customers’ historical behavior, business goals and objectives suffer. Customer satisfaction also goes out the drain because requests and quality leads are met with delays or insufficient outputs. But when you join CRM and ERP solutions, you can easily combat these challenges.

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution is a business app for managing a company’s customer (and potential customer) interactions to improve business relationships that grow a business.

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution refers to a business application that helps companies manage routine business tasks, including accounting, inventory, procurement, risk management, and supply chain functions.

In a nutshell, a CRM solution quickly gives staff members accurate and real-time customer data, while an ERP ensures the data has 360-degree visibility into the organization’s workflow processes.

CRM and ERP together to empower your employees to collaborate and make intelligent decisions seamlessly and quickly. Here are some other benefits of unifying a CRM with your ERP.

Maximize Productivity

Business dynamics are continuously changing with evolving technologies. On-premises solutions that work for your business today are less likely to give you a competitive advantage in the future.

You need an agile system that facilitates growth amidst changing customer and business landscapes. This is what a cloud-based ERP system does. It allows you to scale your business platform to support any extension of features and employees as you grow. System upgrades are also easy to facilitate and maintain.

Gain Efficiency

When different departments or roles implement stand-alone software to meet immediate needs, what can seem like a plausible singular solution creates a network of messy and inaccurate data that delays operations and stifles productivity and efficiency.

Multiple solutions house duplicate information and separate departments could enter or access redundant customer data in respective applications.

But when CRM is embedded into ERP, all data is centralized, meaning an update with the account rep reflects instantly in the customer support department. And when a customer updates information with the account rep, the support team is left with outdated information. With CRM in your ERP, you get total cohesion to ensure a seamless flow and efficiency.

As a result, employees can move between operations and departments using one centralized interface and get immediate access to updated and accurate data.

CRM and ERP solutions also use artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that automate processes like updating business information, which improves efficiency within business workflows.

Boost Customer Satisfaction

A single CRM and ERP interface provides a one source of customer truth that:

• Allows employees to look up the customer support history and understand the customer needs faster, thus, ensuring they give an exact resolution.
• Allows other departments, like the marketing department, to gain insight into customer shopping behaviors and preferences. In response, they can create strategies that meet customer preferences and individual personalities.

Custom dashboards within a CRM interface also allow employees to be assigned tasks by priority. This2 empowers employees to meet their responsibilities without delays or errors, and, in turn, they offer customers prompt service.

Achieve Revenue Goals

By meeting customer needs and demands, the unified ERP and CRM interface allows your business to meet its revenue goals on time. For instance, when C-suite execs get full transparency into the sales project pipeline, they can monitor real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) and customer history to ensure revenue goals are met according to the set schedules. This also makes it easier to identify sales opportunities and challenges, which are crucial determinants of the overall ROI.

By joining CRM and ERP, you cut costs on upgrading or implementing separate software interfaces, which safeguards business cash flow.

Meet Evolving Business Needs

An ERP with an open architecture allows you to easily navigate your business between on-premises and cloud solutions without data loss. This makes it easier to support your business operations from anywhere and anytime.

For instance, if you need integrations to enhance your business operations, the interface offers third-party integration applications that let you add platforms to your business successfully. If you have unlimited users, the system provides unlimited seats for you to assign your users based on your seasonal or permanent needs.

If you maintain a hybrid work model where some of your employees work remotely, the system offers a mobile-friendly solution with similar experiences to everyday mobile devices. And because of the unification with the CRM system, mobile employees can also effortlessly attend to customer and business needs regardless of location.

Drive Customer Retention

First impressions, just as much as product quality and delivery, still matter in a business environment. To drive customer retention, you must ensure the service you offer your customer throughout the supply chain is positive, clear, and consistent.

Embedding a CRM into your ERP allows you to provide a seamless connection between all customer and business management applications. This, in turn, ensures employees have consistent messaging when serving your customers, regardless of their position in the sales pipeline.

Additionally, customers can access updates, account information, or business support anytime through an online portal, which breeds customer loyalty.

CRM + ERP = Growth

Adding your CRM to your ERP solution gives you complete visibility into the customer journey from the moment you get a lead to the end of the sale. This 360-degree view of operations allows you to continually grow your business, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve your business productivity and efficiency. You also drive customer retention by consistently meeting your business, customer, and revenue needs.

FAQs

How can you get the most out of your ERP system?

One sure-fire way is embedding your ERP with your CRM to create one user interface. ERP and CRM integration connects and synchronizes your ERP and CRM software to ensure that automated and consistent information gets shared between solutions for a single source of truth.

Can you integrate ERP and CRM?

Yes. You can easily integrate the ERP and the CRM to get a unified and automated system that is also your one source of truth.

How does CRM help ERP?

ERP systems help businesses manage their backend processes, like operational and financial systems. CRM systems manage customers’ interactions with these business processes, thus giving the business 360-degree visibility into operations.