Critical Factors for Choosing Successful Mobile CRM solution

In the recent years, we have seen rapid advancements and a significant growth in mobile technologies and their usage worldwide. Mobile Customer Relationship Management has emerged with many benefits to the organizations, simplifying business tasks as well as saving operational cost and time. Companies are realizing the need of mobility for attaining higher value from their existing investments in CRM systems, allowing faster and precise data collection and enhanced decision-making.

Mobile CRM enables enterprises explore business through their workforce on field like sales and service teams, to access key information through mobile devices like smartphones and tablets on their move. It also helps the top level executives and senior managers to access business critical information like order details, operational stats, performance reports, etc; and to approve requests on their mobile devices round the clock.

With such significance attached to a mobile CRM system, companies need to consider the following critical factors to employ a successful mobile CRM solution:

Support Device Diversity

The usage of a diverse range of mobile devices by employees of organizations poses a challenge for the IT departments while deploying enterprise mobility solutions. An ideal mobile CRM solution should allow employees to use any mobile device like an iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, Windows based phone or tablets. It should be flexible to support any device OSs to carry out seamless transaction. However instead of offering a common layout for all devices, it’s better when they adapt to the look and feel of device that users carry.

Off-line Functionality

Access to customer data, product information and documents at the right time has become a crucial factor for every customer-centric business. Sales professionals and business managers use mobile CRM solution on their handheld devices every time they need it—meetings, events, travel, etc regardless of time and convenience of internet.

Mobile CRM should provide access to customer data or other information whenever and more importantly wherever needed. They should be designed such that users can always access to the right information at the right moment be it online or off-line. This improves the customer interactions, business decision-making and the productivity.

Open Standards Support Integration

Field professionals not only need access to customer information but also to various other support aspects like product information, sale promotions/offers, service requests and order status. Thus selecting a system which supports integration with a variety of back-end systems like ERP, intranet, legacy, database and e-mail is imperative. It is also wise to opt for the ones that support open standards and be flexible to keep-up with the ever changing device landscape.

Security is Key

Mobile CRM data is a company’s critical asset. It contains confidential information of the company’s customer relationships, partners, suppliers, sales data, product details, some legal documents and crucial data subject to government regulations. Such information is accessed by sales professionals and other workers and is to be totally secured.

With the field professionals having to travel all around and facing severe security threats, mobile CRM applications must ensure enterprise level security through validation, encryption and central, policy-based control.

User-friendliness

Mobile CRM Applications serve their purpose by being user-friendly and easy to operate while accessing data. If the application is hard to use and doesn’t respond swiftly on the handheld devices, it will be of no use during a client interaction.

Mobile CRM applications must be easy to navigate and respond promptly to any queries, with little or no training to the users. User interface of such applications make a huge impact with the users and it must comply with the organization’s unique process and workflow.

Improved User-functionality

Mobile CRM helps to increase business sales opportunities and lead generation by interacting with customers anywhere anytime with valid data at a single touch point. Applications help users even better when they are constantly updated. Employees must be able to revise their visit reports, add new findings of customers and make them up-to-date on their mobile devices.

Latest Technology Upgrades—Social & Location CRM

Social CRM is the best way to connect and engage customers in the CRM process. Instead of marketing messages to customers through email blast or mailers, it is better to update them on social media within CRM. In the current social trend, social media helps to build stronger customer relationship and acts as a medium to provide solution to customers’ needs.

Another trending aspect in mobile CRM is location-based intelligence. Social and location-specific data help professionals to gather and access more details about their customers. Integrating these advanced technologies on one unified environment provides new insight into the profile of customers and prospects on the spot, thus adding more value to CRM process.