Business is all about relationships - relationships between people and their needs, Establishing and maintaining their trust and providing people with valuable and memorable experiences is what business is all about. These essential relationships include, of course, your clients, your employees, your shareholders, your prospects, your vendors, your community – the list goes on and on.
Businesses are also all about information. Or, in other words, using data to form information, to develop knowledge and gain insight into the key elements that mean the most to the business. This includes traditional areas such as financial data and operational data, yet also essential is market data, customer data, and all the other data elements that help make a business tick.
So the question has always been: given that business is all about relationships, how does one gain information, knowledge and insight to help maximize those relationships both during the near and long-term? The answer to that question is at the core of the value Client Relationship Management (CRM) strategies, software, and solutions provide.
, a leading CRM solution from Microsoft, has this relationship management model to include, “anything and everything” relationship management (xRM). To a business leader, xRM means more flexible and adaptable business processes and deeper and more meaningful insight into their most essential key performance indicators.
To an IT leader, xRM is when the “x” is a variable, and means . As described in the Microsoft Developer Network, this pertains to building any extended application on top of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. This may include customizing an existing Dynamics CRM application or designing completely new business applications for, or for connecting to, other areas of the business.
Our practice has heard from a number of clients and other interested parties recently; they desire to extend and connect essential data, information, and systems within their organization. The ability to provide a user-friendly platform that helps enable data and information beyond the traditional one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many constraints allows for a more connected and flexible enterprise.
Now, with xRM enabling “anything-to-everything” relationships, our clients can connect and manage time-reporting data, billing data, project data, business-specific operational and business process data to customer and client data like never before. This enhanced data and improved processes will provide businesses with the ability to build stronger relationships between customers and their needs, establish and maintain their trust, and provide people with valuable and memorable experiences.
By Bret Rhodus, Supervising Consultant, BKD Technologies
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