CRM in Project Services

The purpose of project services is to deliver on time and within budget and to satisfy customers, but it is impossible to give what customers want regardless of time and cost constraints. Project services require making trade-off decisions and maintaining a good relationship with customers, and this is where CRM comes in handy. Successful project services need the support of systems that include customer relationship management, contract management, and project management. CRM is conducive to project management by giving you real-time visibility into customer feedback and improving communication across departments. Also, putting customers at the center of project management is good to deliver the right products/services and establish a close rapport with customers.

Challenge:

In the day-to-day running of a project, we often have to make unpopular decisions related to service delivery. However, decisions about what is best for a project can have financial implications and easily strain business relationships, especially when these decisions are more about the work of the decision-maker/service provider. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to objectively address difficulties and issues such as perceived priority conflicts of interest in appropriate forums.

Solution:

CRM in Project Services contains customer interaction tracking, budgeting and sales channel management functions, which helps service providers:

• Manage customer communications and lifecycle
• Link customer feedback to ongoing projects
• Deliver projects within budget
• Collaborate on customer plans and deliverables
• Coordinate tasks of project, sales and customer service teams
• Execute the project immediately after the transaction is completed

CRM in Project Services can bring you the following benefits:

• Better data management: With all customer and project data on one platform, teams can more easily store, manage and access information. Plus, CRM in Project Services provides a single source of truth and ensures that your project and customer teams rely on the same data to make critical decisions. This will reduce the chance of making mistakes or encountering miscommunication issues.




• Improved deliverables: Here is an example to help you understand how an all-in-one solution improves quality control. Suppose your software development team is creating new features for a dating app. Meanwhile, your team is building a knowledge base for new features. If CRM in Project Services shows that customers are complaining constantly, your customer service team can use CRM features such as customer feedback tracking to turn tickets into actionable tasks for the project team. Your marketing team can post about these fixes before focusing on new features.




• Alignment across departments: Remember, an integrated solution provides you with a single source of truth. This helps your project, marketing, sales and customer service teams achieve a common understanding of customer needs and project progress. It also enables you to create a unified task management and reporting system to facilitate team collaboration. For example, marketing teams can use the tools reports to determine the level of customer interest and decide whether they can sell to customers. If you can sell to a customer, then you can start a new project for the customer.