CRM solutions on smartphones become increasingly popular

Nov. 16, 2010 - PRLog -- According to the report small and medium businesses are highly interested in using mobile solutions for their mobile sales teams. First and foremost CRM applications on smartphones will benefit from this trend, says Germany-based SAP expert ecenta AG.

More than 90 percent of the businesses that took part in the study are convinced that mobile solutions will improve and streamline sales processes by increasing the flexibility of staff as well as by enhancing the quality of data and information about clients and products. In addition most businesses expect better customer service to be another result of mobile CRM solutions.

Another obvious reason to run CRM software on smartphones is the permanent availability of information about clients, products, services and processes. In addition the mobile sales force spends a lot of time travelling, waiting for trains and flights. Employing mobile CRM this time can be spent much more efficiently by updating information, entering results of meetings and planning next steps. In the past these tasks had to be completed in the office. The latest solutions even allow entering data about the latest meeting when there is no connection to a network. As soon as the smartphone is getting a connection the data is getting updated automatically. Another important advantage is the opportunity to integrate the CRM solution with the sales processes even when the sales person is in a client meeting. A popular scenario are negotiations for a sales discount: In case the client asks for a bigger discount that expected meetings used to be suspended for a while so the sales person could get in touch with the company to discuss the client´s request. Using a mobile solution the sales person can enable his colleagues to join the negations in real time and confirm a bigger discount just via the CRM solution on the smartphone.

“Ahead of most businesses SAP has realized the growing demand for mobile CRM solutions. Together with Sybase, which is now a part of SAP, the world´s leading vendor for business software has developed a CRM solution for mobile devices. The different mobile solutions for SAP CRM and “Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite” from Sybase win people over with a high degree of security and platform neutrality. Especially security is a big issues as information about clients are the biggest treasure of many businesses”, said Joachim Schellenberg, business development manager for ecenta AG. “In addition we are going to distribute and install mobile CRM software from Syclo and Sky Technologies.  The software “Sky Mobile” integrates directly with SAP CRM without any costly middleware. This helps to reduce complexity which makes the installation of the software quick and easy. The number of potential error source is low as well. Having the choice between different solutions enables us to offer our clients the best answer to their demands.”

According to Joachim Schellenberg the future of mobile CRM solution will mainly depend on the development of the latest smartphones. In a forecast Gartner assumes that in 2012 about 50 percent of the mobile staff will leave their laptops at home and use a different mobile device. For the sales force the smartphone might become the most important device. All vendors are going to add new features to their smartphones which will make them even more attractive to the mobile sales force. For ecenta AG, the integration of Web 2.0 applications with mobile CRM solutions will play an important role in the future as well.

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