As a CIO or CRM leader working for a manufacturing company, there are likely many issues rising to the top of your list as priorities to better manage the volatile supply chain for your business, with items related to ERP system upgrades, demand forecasting changes and applications to leverage the cloud. One area that often does not fall on tech leaders' radars is CRM, despite the huge investments made in CRM and marketing automation systems that enable the sales and marketing teams. So here are four key tactics that a CRM leader can focus on this year with minimal effort and high value that will provide a proactive customer experience, reducing service costs dramatically.
1. Enable order transparency for customers.
As the supply chain volatility escalates with inflation, customers are demanding more transparency on the status of orders and availability of parts, and they want changes in order statuses to be communicated in real time. With manufacturers having multiple systems, such as an e-commerce portal for orders, a back-office ERP system for order processing and a CRM system for notifying the sales team, it becomes extremely difficult to integrate them all and notify customers of orders. To overcome this, here are three simple steps that manufacturers can do immediately.
• Manufacturers can leverage an integration strategy using their current ETL and ESB tools to move all the order status indicators to a CRM system. It can be very helpful to share all the data with sales, channel partners and e-commerce portals in one place.
• Have a strategy for order orchestration in which your system of order records is the ERP software, but the system of engagement is CRM.
• If you are using SAP as the ERP solution and Salesforce CRM as the CRM system, innovative apps like Enosix that offer real-time integrations with SAP can be a game-changer and make this happen with less time and effort.
2. Leverage Web3 for inventory visibility.
As Web3 technologies continue to evolve and move mainstream, blockchain solutions provide a promising way to promote supply chain transparency for the customers. As an example, Walmart leveraged blockchain with its food supply partners to provide ingredient supplies, quality checks and availability issues along with a secure blockchain node that helped in greater order transparency. This would be a great use case for technology leaders to do a proof of concept with blockchain solutions to test order transparency and help internal IT teams learn new solutions. This can pave the way for future growth and morale boosts for IT teams that keep them excited about new innovations.
3. Communicate order status by leveraging marketing automation systems.
One of the least utilized systems for manufacturers is marketing automation systems, which are often just used as funnel sources to capture inquiries and requests. Most marketing automation tools have a journey feature that is capable of sending one-on-one personalized messages to customers based on context and the channel of choice.
With increasing inquiries about orders and the supply chain, instead of sending duplicate messages with ERP and CRM systems, marketing teams should be leveraged to send personalized messages to customers at different stages of orders and for any supply chain changes, thus creating transparency and building trust with customers. The benefits of this could range from saving a lot of time in inquiries to building greater personalized experiences with customers, which could result in significant cost savings.
4. Enable order pickup at drop-ship locations.
One of the trends manufacturers are doing now is allowing customers to pick up orders at multiple locations, like warehouses, partner drop-ship locations and other pickup points, to reduce order backlogs. As a technology leader, here are some strategies that will allow your business to leverage this trend.
• Consider order process orchestration in your CRM systems for drop-ship orders, which will allow your sales and service teams to collaborate on orders right away and provide visibility to your distributor networks.
• Have an integration strategy to allow bidirectional synchronization of orders between CRM and ERP systems to improve order visibility across all departments. Leveraging point-and-click integration solutions on the cloud and changing the system of records from ERP to CRM for specific orders will go a long way toward making this happen.
• Cloud-based apps that are deeply integrated with your cloud-based CRM systems can help make this visibility easy by sharing order data between your CRM and ERP with point-and-click mapping instead of a whole integration approach.
This is a time when CRM leaders should be proactive with the roadmaps and priorities that will help their businesses navigate uncertainty. The whole supply chain crisis can be viewed as a blessing in disguise to test new Web3 technologies and changing mindsets on integration strategy, which will help to align with your digital transformation efforts.