Get over the Winter business blues – Part 3

By Mike Richardson, Managing Director EMEA

If you have followed the previous two steps in ‘Get over the Winter business blues’ series of blogs then you’ll know all about retaining your customers and increasing productivity with CRM, but how can this reduce the immovable ‘elephant’ in the room – operating expenses.

Reducing your operating expenses is something all senior managers should look at in detail. It is not just a practice for struggling companies. All companies can improve their profit margin.

However, achieving any notable reduction in your operating costs without damaging your output is no simple task – there is a fine equilibrium that most business people don’t want to risk upsetting. I’m sure many will be familiar with the scenario in which you look at your input and output and are confounded at most attempts to reduce one whilst keeping the other stable.

The good news is CRM can provide various ways in which you can get around this age old problem of getting more for less:

• Firstly you can easily create proportional reductions in your operating profits. CRM enhances the productivity of your whole workforce, meaning revenues are likely to go up, whilst your overheads remain stationary. This may seem a bit of cheat as you aren’t actually reducing your operating expenses, but it makes good business sense if you’re panning for long term profit margin growth.
• Secondly you can cut expenditure on agency services. CRM enables you to bring certain agency services in house, without overloading your staff. Due to time saved on your staff’s everyday tasks they will have a growing amount of time going spare. If you have agencies handling telemarketing, lead processing, graphic design etc. you can bring these in house with a little staff training and save yourself a considerable budget.
• Third, if a head count reduction or freeze is planned you can sustain output. Reducing your staff levels doesn’t mean your output has to decrease, CRM can up the productivity of a single member of staff to such a level that they can take on the workload of a whole team in some situations, with the help of automated tasks and triggered events.
• Fourth, CRM allows you to find the inefficient areas more easily. In many cases knowing what to reduce and when to do it can be a big problem in itself. But with data readily available and automated through Action Plans, key milestone alerts and customised dashboard reports CRM enable you to locate what’s not working out from an operating cost perspective and act upon it.
• Finally, you can integrate home working, hot desking and other cost saving practices in your office more effectively with web access and mobile CRM. Good CRM solutions will provide full web access and comprehensive mobile access, allowing your staff to work anywhere, at any time on whatever mobile device or PC they have.

At this point, I’m sure some of you may dismiss a concept which implies the solution to cutting operating expenses is through the investment in what can be an expensive IT implementation. However, it doesn’t have to be, any top CRM provider will have various options around cloud hosted CRM solutions which come at a low monthly subscription fee, giving you all the benefits and none of the hassle or significant investment.

So, CRM really is the one solution for those of you wishing to retain customers, increase productivity and reduce operating expenses.