This unique module has taken the concept of traditional contact management much further by weaving it into the very fabric of the Evolution Accounting System. Sage Evolution CRM is a tool that lets you manage the interaction between your business and your customers, potential customers, suppliers and even your fellow company members.
Any activity that takes place in a business, and is important enough to be tracked, is recorded as an incident. Sage Evolution CRM will track these incidents to their conclusion, or until they are closed off. Evolution will store incidents even after they have been closed, allowing you to track a history of events as they occurred, as far back as you wish. Using this information, you can track all sales and support activities associated with a customer and the agent or agent group who dealt with the customer.
There are two versions of Sage Evolution CRM:
- Sage Evolution CRM Standard contains basic incident tracking as outlined above.
- The full version, Sage Evolution CRM Premium, contains more advanced features outlined as follows:
Sales Force Automation Evolution
Sales Force Automation allows you to track sales opportunities for existing and prospective customers. Sales personnel can update the status of opportunities through customisable sales cycle workflow steps. They can continually update the estimated possibility of making a successful sale. Information can also be captured about competitors, so that you can recognise and track patterns about sales lost to competitors. You can use this information to give sales personnel and managers an overview of the current sales pipeline and to produce sales forecast reports. These reports show actual values weighted by the probability of closing the sale.
Business Gateway
The Business Gateway extends Sage Evolution CRM onto the Internet and allows customers to log into the system. Customers can create, view and update incidents. Customers do not need to contact a call centre and wait in queues for an agent. Internet queries are notorious for not being dealt with or acknowledged. However, the Business Gateway sends each query into Sage Evolution CRM individually, where it is tracked and escalated. The Business Gateway requires Microsoft® IIS and Windows 2000 Server or later.
Calendar
The calendar organises your company’s time management. Incidents can be prioritised by date. The calendar also allows you to integrate incident priorities with employees’ availability.
Knowledge Base
The Knowledge Base lets employees create topics. In these topics, they can share information about support, sales or any other issues. In addition, employees can link documents from the document list into Knowledge Base articles. The articles can also be linked to incidents and if you e-mail incidents, you can optionally include the Knowledge Base articles in the e-mail, either in the text or as an attachment.
Workflow Processing
Workflow processing allows you to process incidents on an authorisation basis. You create a hierarchy of actions that a process has to go through in order to complete. For example, if you are installing a product for a customer, you may require a site inspection, installation, testing and approval stages. You create these workflow steps and then specify which agents or agent groups can approve each step. If necessary, the responsible person can send the process back to an earlier stage. If an inspection fails, for example, the responsible person can send the process back to the installation action. This type of processing ensures the highest level of quality.
Contract Invoicing
This feature allows you to set up contracts for customers, based on time or number of incidents. If a customer’s contract expires, agents cannot process incidents for the customer. This ensures that customers who are up-to-date always receive prompt service. If you use the Annuity Billing module, you can produce automatic renewal invoices for contracts that are about to expire.
Microsoft® Outlook Integration
Seamless integration with Microsoft® Outlook 2007/2010 allows you to capture all communication with your customers directly into contact management. The ability to capture new or existing incidents and sales leads allows you to be more efficient and productive using an interface that allows you to communicate on a daily basis. Customer and prospect contact details are available from Evolution and the Outlook Calendar appointments make tracking appointments via the contact management module even easier to do. Sage Evolution CRM Premium can be purchased as a stand-alone product.