Here at Parallels, we love hearing from our incredible users about how Parallels® Desktop for Mac empowers their productivity at work. Business owners deserve to run the software they need on the devices they have. Whether our users are small independent businesses or large enterprise corporations, customer relationship management (CRM) software is a vital tool […]
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Field management software is a system that helps in the running of the business. It takes complete charge of dispatching activities. With this system one can ensure that his material will reach its destination on time.
A dispatcher needs to a keep tab with the driver on where the vehicle is and when will it reach. Constant phone calls connect them. But with this technology, the dispatcher does not have to worry. He can access the vehicle’s information as and when needed. The system helps in field service management and makes the administrator’s task simpler and stress-free. Some of the most important features to look for while buying field management software are:
Client Management
This feature helps you maintain records of your clients including your client’s contact details, purchase history and choices for a lifetime. Any feedback or note can also be stored. You can access the data anytime you want. This will help you to stay informed even on old client related matters thus helping you build strengthened relationships with your client.
Scheduling
This feature is the most vital part of the system. It helps you track the exact location of your vehicle. It also suggests which route to take while travelling. This saves the fuel costs and time taken for hunting the place. You can inform the customer about the exact time your representative will take to reach. This ensures that your delivery is made on time. Also, you can keep proper track of the schedule, work processes, breaks, and completion of any projects. The scheduling system helps you provide your customer with the best of service, thus building on the trust factor.
Billing
Your accounting team can relax as this feature in the system keeps an accurate record of your transactions and is capable of preparing instant bills. It helps to abolish the cumbersome paperwork. The system can take electronic signatures and work orders with an assurance that the data won’t be lost. Papers can be lost or damaged, but electronic data gets stored for a lifetime. Moreover, the customer can also pay your bills through electronic means. Time taken to complete a certain task and the amount of hours that a particular employee dedicates to the office are also evaluated.
Task Management
It is a feature that acts as a planner for your employees’ tasks which provides workforce management solutions. Employees can have their whole planner ready and inform you regarding the progress of each task. You can give them a deadline to inform when a specific task is expected to be complete. They can notify you once a particular task is completed while you can update them about the task that needs to be done on priority. Thus, all the tasks carried out by the employees can be easily monitored using the Task Management system.
Business Intelligence
This feature helps you to develop your business by giving analytic reports of your activities. It will help you identify your shortcomings and work on it beforehand. You can understand your own business better, which will help you to progress and keep abreast with consumer demands and expectations. You can also keep a check on your cash intake and expenditures on a regular basis.
Good field management software will help your business in many ways. It helps you to do away with unwanted tasks by acting as a waste management software too. The efficiency will boost customer satisfaction, and a happier customer is sure to bring more customers, more business and more profits to you.
Click here to get more information on Field Service Management.
“Digital marketing” is now a familiar term across age groups spending time on online and mobile interfaces. The digital media space can no longer be ignored and companies in varying fields, from pharmaceutical to telecom have started to take it seriously, and invest in it for the long term.
Large companies would need a strong presence in the digital arena. This means that many stakeholders would be involved in handling different kinds of digital media. For example, one agency might be in charge of the website creation and social media content, while another might handle email campaigns and banner ads. Add the technology service provider to this mix, and you could be headed for confusion. It is prudent to address this situation before it gets out of hand.
To implement a collaborative platform for one of its clients in business information services, HCL Tech used the following main 7 components:
Shared Technology Platform
The platform that was implemented had to be common across all the digital agencies and the technology service provider. It would form the foundation of the solution, and had to be capable enough to handle all the common assets, activities and reporting mechanisms.
Common Understanding of Objectives
The big picture is very important in such a collaborative scenario, and each digital agency and technology provider should have an idea of the objective to be achieved. This would help them understand the importance of their individual responsibilities clearly.
Definition of Roles
When multiple stakeholders are involved, the interfaces between them play an important role. This means that a single point of contact should be defined in each digital agency, as well as at the technology service provider and at the client’s end. The team structure within each team should also be uniformly and clearly defined, including special role definitions such as BIS digitization services.
Clear Definition of Responsibilities
In most situations, the final accountability might lie with the client’s business team, but it is important to define a responsibility matrix for all the stakeholders involved. This would help to identify the points of success, as well as to pinpoint any issues at an early stage.
Training Requirements
It is essential that the service provider provides the required training about the platform to the digital agencies, and also is available for guidance after the participants have started using it. Some of the aspects to be covered by the training include features of the platform, storage and access of digital assets, managing information, workflows and reporting mechanisms.
What are Workflows?
A common platform is effective only if used in a collaborative and uniform manner by all the stakeholders. The creation and review of workflows need to be performed by the end users of the platform from the client’s team, but in close discussion with the digital agencies.
Why are Reporting Mechanisms Important?
Reporting is an important step for tracking progress, and requires a common template to be established for use by all agencies.
Why are Reporting Mechanisms Important?
Reporting is an important step for tracking progress, and requires a common template to be established for use by all agencies.
Opting for a shared technology platform at an early stage of digital marketing would improve efficiency and brand image. It would also ensure that your digital marketing campaigns reach the required audience within an optimal period of time.
To know more about the topic please refer to the whitepaper written by HCL Technologies
If you run a higher educational institution, your student is your customer. Surprising as it may sound, consider this: the focus of most initiatives in your institute needs to be the student. Starting from attracting them to join your institute, to the way their association with you is managed, you could achieve desired results if you plan your strategy keeping the student in the spotlight.
IT can play an essential role in helping you manage student relations. A Student Relationship Management (SRM) framework can help you forge a better connection with your students, keep you aware of any reasons that could cause dissatisfaction or churning and provides mechanisms to address such situations at the earliest.
Challenges to be addressed by an SRM Solution
Some of the challenges faced by higher educational institutions are:
Improving student enrolment and retention
Encouraging a lifelong learning process, including alumni engagement
Bringing about pricing optimization for education companies to make higher education affordable for the student yet profitable for the provider
Motivating the creation of educational products and services
Building and maintaining the brand image across all channels of publicity
Engaging and retaining staff
Other than the students, it is the faculty who play a very important role in establishing the reputation of an institution, which, in turn, attracts the required students. An efficient 360° SRM system would consider the goals of all the stakeholders and incorporate them in a student-centric manner.
SRM Systems Incorporate Changing Roles and Experiences
All the stakeholders, including students, faculty and administrative personnel go through a range of experiences in association with the institution.Beginning from when they enter the institute as strangers to the sense of belonging them cultivate over time; they would need to be treated differently according to their changing role. A seasoned vendor such as HCL Tech would ensure that these changing roles and functions are also a part of the provided system. This means that any situations that require intervention, such as a dissatisfied student who may be thinking of leaving the institution, would definitely have an addressing mechanism. If the design accounts for all such cases, hardly any scenario would remain truly “unexpected”.
SRM Solutions Harness Social Media
The management bodies of educational institutions would definitely be aware of the reach of social media among students. You can now harness the might of this medium in a positive manner. A service provider like HCL Tech could help you with using a popular platform like Facebook or Twitter to actively engage with an existing and prospective student population. For example, a Facebook page could be a medium used by the institution for such interaction. Social media apps used along with pattern recognition mechanisms may also be used.
Choosing HCL Tech to implement your 360° Student Relationship Management System is an important step, as it ensures that you receive a comprehensive, modern and efficient solution. All the building blocks including the data layer, CRM services, data analytics and social ecosystem, including mobile apps, would beput in place for you. All you need to do is to build on them further and operate them efficiently to ensure the success of your institution’s student relations strategy.
To know more about the topic please read the whitepaper presented by HCL Technologies.
Infrastructure-as-a-service or IaaS is slowly yet steadily improving as the longest solutions towards successful integration of services and its management. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management systems are perhaps the quickest systems to adapt to legacy systems particularly on the cloud. Companies have not left any stone unturned when it came to adopting to the cloud, particularly towards adopting legacy systems. Not only have companies upgraded their spending potential for adapting to the cloud but it has also seen the adoption of cloud-based platforms as the leading trend with towards profit maximization and corporate sustainability.
Are companies inclined to spend more in IaaS?
According to a recent Gartner study, public cloud services are likely improve over the years which indirectly means that the global spending in infrastructure management is likely to grow. The growth rate or the CAGR will sustain at 17.7% over the years till the year 2016. Here’s what they predict about the investments in IaaS or infrastructure-as-a-service.
At a sustained CAGR of 41.3% till 2016, the investments in IaaS is likely to be the fastest growing segments in the world. As companies want to reach to a wider audience, there is no doubt that companies want to achieve a competitive advantage before their competitors.
Geographically too, companies across the world are increasing their IT spending towards cloud computing to enhance their company’s performance.
Essentially, companies in Northern America, and Western Europe are the most eager or have already captured the benefits of cloud computing with an integrated infrastructure management.
So, what is the direct advantage of having a cloud computing for integrated infrastructure management? Let’s take a look at the 4 critical advantages of having an integrated infrastructure management on the cloud:
In other words, by implementing the best of IT integrated infrastructure strategies, one is virtually capable of indulging in cost savings, heightened competitive advantage, and greater accountability.
To know more about infrastructure management please visit HCL Technologies
Bitrix has released a new version of Bitrix24, its free enterprise social network and collaboration suite for small businesses. The new release allows users to create, edit and collaborate on documents online, without having MS Office suite installed on their personal computers.
In addition to using Bitrix24 instant messenger for video and group chats, users now have access to video conferencing and screen sharing capabilities. Email connectors to MS Exchange, Outlook, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo!, iCloud and other popular e-mail services have been added to enable e-mail access from Bitrix24 accounts.
Activity Stream has been enhanced with real time updates, smart forwarding, notification options and company-wide announcements, while engagement analytics module (Company Pulse) has been added to provide real time indicators for enterprise social network adoption, identify roadblocks and slow adopters, and show which intranet tools are currently being (under)used by employees.
Bitrix24 has also released a fully functional mobile CRM, which allows creation or editing of CRM entries and invoices directly from the mobile device. The new mobile app also allows using multiple Bitrix24 accounts from a single smartphone or tablet.
“2013 has been a year of significant growth for us, – said Bitrix24 CEO Dmitry Valyanov, – we’ve signed up 90,000 companies, which is well over 500,000 users for the cloud and onsite versions of Bitrix24 intranet. Our workforce grew by 40% to over 130 employees and we opened three new sales and support offices. GooglePlay now lists Bitrix24 among the top 5 mobile intranet apps, along with or surpassing such established enterprise social brands as Jive Software, IBM Connection, VMWare SocialCast and TIBCO Tibbr. We hope to have a million users by the end of the year.”
Bitrix24 is 100% free to any company or organization with up to 12 employees. Bitrix24 paid cloud plans are priced at $99/mo (50 GB) and $199/mo (100 GB), and both come with unlimited users.
FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company, and Bluewolf, the global business consulting firm “born in the cloud,” today announced a strategic global partnership. Together, Bluewolf and FinancialForce.com will help companies access and improve visibility into data that speeds bookings-to-billing cycles and enriches customer engagement.
Bluewolf and FinancialForce.com will provide cloud-based applications and services to joint customers that eliminate the borders between the front and back office, and consolidate information across disparate customer relationship management (CRM), back office and supply chain applications. This will allow companies to organize as teams around their customers, instead of internal departmental structures.
“Rather than invest in the maintenance of rigid, on-premises systems, the cloud frees us to focus on customizations and innovations that meet customer needs and create a first-mover advantage in the market,” said Jonathan Adlerstein, CIO of Plymouth Rock Energy. “Working with Bluewolf and FinancialForce.com, we have integrated our sales, customer care, marketing and billing information in the cloud, enabling employees at every level to own any customer interaction.”
Two areas of focus for the Bluewolf and FinancialForce.com partnership will be media billing and general accounting processes.
“Billing reconciliation is a problem for online media companies as most back office systems used to manage ad billing are unequipped to handle changes in orders and invoices. This can result in long billing cycles, unacceptable Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and in some cases, lost revenues,” said Jeremy Roche, president and CEO of FinancialForce.com. “FinancialForce.com’sMedia and Accounting offerings coupled with Bluewolf’s expertise in the industry will make us the go-to team for customers seeking a proven end-to-end solution.”
As partners, FinancialForce.com and Bluewolf will provide customized and scalable cloud-based billing solutions that reduce the time it takes organizations to send invoices, resulting in a faster turnaround on receivables.
KXEN today announced the launch of Predictive Offers on salesforce.com’s AppExchange, empowering businesses to connect with customers, partners and employees in entirely new ways. Now, predictive analytics, which traditionally has only been available on-premise to large B2C companies with dedicated teams of data scientists, is available to salesforce.com customers of all sizes. Predictive Offers takes all the rich CRM and social profile data residing in Salesforce to deliver personalized offer recommendations.
In contrast to rule-based offer systems which are complicated to setup and maintain and often are based on intuition or outdated analysis, a predictive model-based next best activity solution learns by itself, analyzing all available information to create a mathematically optimal score.
Built on the Salesforce Platform, the world’s leading cloud platform for social and mobile business apps, Predictive Offers is currently available on the AppExchange.
“We are bringing the power of predictive analytics to Salesforce, where in the past, only large companies with dedicated resources could benefit from this level of analytic sophistication,” said John Ball, CEO of KXEN. “Predictive Offers™ simplifies the next best activity process so that customer service agents in every company can make the right offer to the right customer at the right time.”
“Personalizing customer conversations in real-time is essential to accelerate success in the cloud,” said Alex Bard, senior vice president, Service Cloud, salesforce.com. “By harnessing the massive amounts of customer and social data in Salesforce, KXEN is leveraging the power of the Salesforce Platform to provide customers with the right tools – such as real-time next best activity solutions – to drive their transformation into customer companies.”
With KXEN’s cloud-based Predictive Offers, there is no complicated setup, no need to manually define what makes a good offer and no prior analytical knowledge required. Salesforce users simply install the application, add an offer, and the solution instantly starts learning. Offer models are uniquely built for each Salesforce customer, automatically, using both native and custom fields.
Key Features of Predictive Offers:
As a mid-tier ERP and CRM solution, NetSuite is an affordable software-as-a-service platform for small to mid-sized businesses. The cloud-based interface makes the platform available from anywhere with Internet access. Some of the many business tasks covered by NetSuite include sales and service tracking, order fulfillment management, project collaboration and lead tracking.
NetSuite Benefits
The benefits offered by NetSuite will differ between businesses. However, there are a number of service tiers and pre-configured options from which to choose that can help to provide maximum benefit with minimal start-up and implementation times. Benefits offered across most business types and sizes include:
How NetSuite Works
NetSuite is most often provided as a hosted service. This means that the platform is accessed and used through a web interface. Every person within the business uses the same interfaces and databases. This allows for real-time updates, instant access to information and improved interaction between departments and business segments. Setting access rights and roles by account or tier provides simple data management, user accountability and security.
Things to Consider before Choosing NetSuite
Though NetSuite offers many ways to customize and personalize the ERP experience, it is, at its core, a pre-configured product. This means that in-depth customization is often a highly involved process. Many NetSuite service providers will offer demonstrations or free trials to see if the product’s interface and features are a good fit for your business.
To help determine if NetSuite is a proper fit for your business, consider NetSuite consulting services. Professionals can help explain what to expect and provide an in-depth look in how your business can utilize the platform without the worry of service contracts, costly set up fees or time intensive research and training.
More Food for Thought…
As a cloud-based service, NetSuite offers a unified platform that is accessed using a high-speed Internet connection. However, with lack of local back up or local server solutions, any interruption in Internet service will result in an inability to access your NetSuite services.
NetSuite is a modular solution. This means that features can be added or removed on-demand to suit the needs of your business. Unfortunately, this also means that updating the platform can be tricky. Since modules are updated independently, you may find that you are forced to wait to implement an update due to conflicting module configurations and other issues.
The most common way of signing up for NetSuite service is through a value-added reseller. Comparing resellers and service providers is an essential part of finding the best NetSuite configuration. Phone and email support directly through NetSuite require recurring subscription costs as well. By finding a reseller that offers support, you can avoid unforeseen fees and service issues.
NetSuite is a proven platform for businesses of nearly any size. However, like any software suite, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the platform is essential to maximizing benefits.
Intelliverse has launched IntelliBuzz, a social media monitoring service. IntelliBuzz helps organizations listen, engage, measure and optimize interactions across multiple social platforms to develop a better understanding of customers and markets, integrate a social CRM channel and align social strategies with overall business objectives.
“Today’s businesses cannot choose whether or not to engage in social media,” said Frank E. Paterno, VP of Marketing at Intelliverse. “Customers are expressing both joy and frustration socially. Companies that aren’t listening and choose not to participate in these conversations will quickly become obsolete.”
The IntelliBuzz service can help companies in the following areas:
