CRM - Customer Relationship Management

axis diplomat contains a host of CRM facilities included as standard that are ideal for managing the day-to-day interaction with customers whilst companies that run intensive telesales or with a range of pro-active marketing activities, may also benefit from the Campaign Management facilities that are also included as standard.

Using the CRM facilities included as standard with every axis diplomat system, you are able to:

• record details of prospects as well as customers on your Sales Ledger; prospects cannot have orders, invoices, cash, etc. booked to their account but when they become a customer, their status can be changed at the click of a mouse, preserving all of the contact and quotation history from when they were a prospect
• define your own custom categorisation for customers and prospects to provide accurate profiling; for example you may decide that you want to categorise by geographic area (perhaps simply – south east, south west, midlands, etc), business type (manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, etc) and so on – in up to ten different categories
• record details of an unlimited number of individuals (contacts) within each customer, prospect or supplier; including DDI telephone or fax numbers, email addresses, mobile numbers, etc.
• synchronise those contacts to your SmartPhone
• categorise contacts using your own custom categorisation – perhaps, for example, you might choose to categorise them as director, manager, purchasing clerk, warehouse, accounts, etc. – each contact can belong to up to four different categories so one contact can, for example, be both a director and an accounts contact
• attach external documents to each customer, prospect or supplier – for example, scanned copies of trade agreements, maps, Microsoft Excel™ spreadsheets, etc.

Call History

The heart of the CRM facilities provided, as standard within axis diplomat, is Call History. This allows you to keep a history of any contact or communication between you and your customers or prospects. Each call can be associated with a specific individual within the organisation that you are dealing with and can be allocated to the responsibility of one of your operators. Calls can be categorised using your own custom categorisation and also have a type - sales, accounts, service, etc. Calls also have a current status - Call Back, Outstanding, In Progress, Complete.

This means that the Call History facility can be used simultaneously for sales management, credit control and customer services.

Monitor functions can be configured to allow you to keep track of, and analyse calls so that you can see, for example, the number of outstanding calls for a particular member of staff, department or customer.

External documents, such as emails, PDFs, Microsoft Word™ documents, etc. can also be attached to Calls on the system, allowing a complete history of the item to be seen by anyone at any time. The system also allows you to create Word documents attached to the call from a selection of Word templates that you can add to the system. Information (such as names and addresses) can be automatically merged into the template when axis diplomat creates the Word document. This means that all of your standard letters can be stored within the axis diplomat system and produced at will, with contact information already inserted for you at the point of creation.

Using the CRM Information

As the information is accumulated within the CRM areas of the axis diplomat system, various facilities are available to utilise that data:

You can, for example, create a mail merge within Microsoft Word™. Depending on how you set up the custom and contact categorisation, you could send a mailing to all of the Accounts contacts within all of the Wholesale companies in the Midlands.

axis diplomat also includes ‘emailshot’ capability as standard so in addition to (or instead of) sending a paper mailing, you can send an email to all of those contacts.

Campaign Management

Campaign Management offers a range of facilities designed for busy telesales operations or highly pro-active sales and marketing departments for both managing a rotating sales cycle and for ad-hoc telesales or marketing campaigns.

Campaigns are created for specific marketing exercises, such as an individual mailer or catalogue, and also for repeat calls, with a specified frequency. Customers and prospects can then be assigned to a number of campaigns.

Once customers and/or prospects have been added to a campaign, a range of facilities are available to manage contact with those customers or prospects:

• the emailshot capability within axis diplomat allows an email to be sent to all contacts within a given campaign, where those contacts have valid email addresses and have not previously indicated that they wish to opt out from (or have not explicitly opted in to) email marketing
• mailing details can be extracted for all of the contacts within a campaign to allow a traditional postal mailshot to be sent
• a monitor function is provided to manage the telephone call cycle, including keeping track of callbacks when the buyer is not available, and for rapidly updating records, entering orders and quotations as a result of calls.

Telephone Preference Service

Companies calling prospective customers, as opposed to existing account customers, should be aware that it is their responsibility to ensure that those prospects, whether individuals or commercial organisations, are not registered with the Telephone Preference Service, or TPS (or, in the case of a fax shot, the Fax Preference Service, or FPS). axisfirst offers a separate module to such customers allowing numbers to be validated against an online TPS/FPS database – please contact axisfirst for more information on this.