There is always a strong focus in IT implementations towards providing management with better information, giving them a better overview to make better decisions. But let’s not forget about the people in the front line – those who do sales and take care of customer service.

Even though management teams do need the best tools to provide them with the most accurate data to take the business forward, most of the decisions that matter to your customers are not made by management. They are made by customer-facing people.

Data you can trust

Think about it. In your organization, regardless the value of making accurate reporting to support business decisions, nothing is more important than your customer service. In fact, the entire value chain has to be able to add value to your customer, at every interaction.

Good customer-facing operations depend on data you can trust. Your data has to be complete, accurate, consistent and unique. More than any other part of your organization your customer-facing staff is not only dependent on reporting and visualization to do their job well – they are by nature data-driven in a customer-centric universe.

Read also: 3 easy steps to take when planning your data integration project

Data integration can make you more customer-centric

Let’s say for example, that you need to replicate data between multiple Microsoft Dynamics NAV entities. Another advantage is that you do not need to purchase extra NAV objects. The Rapidi Replicator provides automatic data replication between multiple Microsoft Dynamics databases – allowing you to continue working and selling even if your network is down and replicate later. And it gives you the possibility of using Microsoft Dynamics NAV web services or NAS Server (Access to C/AL Code).

Read also: 5 critical factors to successful data integration

In order to provide customer-centric service, you need to have the right data available at the right time – which means that integrating data across your business applications (for example your CRM and ERP) is no longer “nice to have”, it has become a “Must”. Why? Because:

• Your sales and other customer-facing people do not like to waste valuable time consolidating information from multiple systems – time that would be spent on qualification, positioning and up- or cross-selling opportunities. It is frustrating having a job where islands of data prevent you from meeting or exceeding your customers’ expectations.
• Salesforce recently made a survey among 10,500 of their customers, randomly selected. The survey showed that you can achieve 35% more sales, 33% more customer retention and 17% less time spent selling when you bring relevant, valuable data to your sales staff .
• Re-keying data that could be transferred automatically to other systems is a motivation killer and often results in inconsistent data between systems , simply because people postpone and forget to update the other system. It’s irritating but it is human. And sooner or later, mistake will be made because of incorrect data and people will begin to build their personal systems to store and keep track of what they believe is the accurate data. After that, the value of your system will skydive faster than the stock exchange during a recession.

The funny part is that this would be so easy to fix with data integration! If you are in sales and you are working with islands of data, it is time to claim access to seamlessly integrated customer data – accurate, reliable and accessible.
If you are using Salesforce, it can be integrated in less than 10 days – sometimes even in just one day – using RapidiOnline. Get in touch with me and I will be happy to show you how you can improve your sales KPIs by converting siloed data into customer-facing insight.

Read also: Clean and accurate data with data integration