Why you need to quit standalone business applications now

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) hold an important role in the world’s economy. They have a strong potential to grow and outsmart their bigger rivals. But what holds them to do so?

99% of the SMBs struggle with decisions to manage their expanding operations. As and when their business requires, they install different applications like CRM, ERP etc. But what they fail to realize is that installation of different standalone business applications results in business process inefficiencies and software integration challenges.

Do not believe? Read the three main disadvantages of standalone business applications:

1. Less Employee Productivity: Imagine if your employees have to juggle between 3-4 different business software systems to understand one case history. Chances are by the time your employee understands the customer complaint, customer has already made up his mind to switch over his loyalty.

And this will not just happen with customer service but in other departments too.

Example – if your employees take time to provide information on order status or are not aware of the history of customers’ purchases, customers will be less satisfied and less likely to continue purchasing from you.

Plus, with inefficient and disjointed processes, there will always be high possibility that your employees will make errors manually re-entering information into the CRM, accounting and invoicing system.

And what if any orders are changed or canceled? Your employees will have to sift through mounds of data to reconcile and change the order details again.

No doubt - such labor-intensive manual tasks will reduce the agility that your company needs to grow.

2. No Real-time Visibility: When you run a business with different business systems, you deal with multiple overlapping databases. As a result, you do not get accurate view of your business growth.

You waste countless hours streamlining data siloes and bringing the information together. In most cases the combined information is not 100% accurate also. As a result, you end up making critical decisions slowly, based on inaccurate data. Frightening isn’t it?

And if you think that you can skip the problem by not acquiring the total company information on a regular basis – think again.

Will you be able to make crucial business decisions purely on gut instinct?

3. Increased cost: Imagine the number of hours your IT department has to spend integrating, maintaining, and acquiring new versions of CRM software, ERP software etc. Not to forget the added cost that comes along with the maintenance of these different systems.

In short, your IT team’s productivity gets wasted while software maintenance costs shoot up.

So is there any way that these problems can be avoided?

Yes - a complete Business Management Software application!

Instead of investing in a Customer management software, Marketing software, Sales software, separately – invest in one unified application that manages all.

A Business Management Software will empower your business with several qualities:

• Business Agility
• Improved Visibility
• Scalability
• Cost Savings
• Data Management
• Increased Business Growth.

This is why the modern CRMs are no more just restricted to customer relationship management? They enable you to manage and monitor sales, marketing, customer service, collaboration and inventory from one interface.

In fact this is why now many SMBs have already started picking up the integrated business management suites, leaving behind the best of breed systems.

See what the CRM expert Chuck Schaeffer has stated –

‘’SMBs are showing purchase preference for fewer, broader applications as opposed to more discrete or best of breed systems which have to be cobbled together. Technology providers need to recognize that SMBs don’t have the time or patience to create or troubleshoot system integration, incur the annual upgrade issues or somehow string together data siloes.’’