4 Ways a CRM Can Improve the Customer Experience

Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are commonly used by sales teams to manage brand reputation and customer engagement. There are three types of CRMs: Operational, analytical, and collaborative. While all three types share common functionalities (contact management for storing information, interaction tracking for customer behavior history, and lead management for lead conversion), they all have areas where customer experience can be improved. Scott Clark, Web technology and SEO expert, shares an article on CMS Wire of four areas to utilize your CRM system for improved customer experience.

CRMs Allow Brands to Form Better Relationships With Customers. “Many CRMs provide the ability to send automated emails to customers, enabling a brand to remain in touch with a customer through personalized emails that deliver relevant content, offers, coupons, seasonal promotions, and incentives.”

A CRM Can Improve Customer Service. “CRMs provide instant access to every interaction that the customer has had with a brand, including chat history, purchase history, and customer service tickets. This enables customer service support staff to instantly pull up the customer’s details while they are interacting with them.”

Faster Response Time. “Many CRMs are using AI and process automation to identify customer sentiment through analytics, and facilitate more rapid responses to customer service inquiries and even social media posts. Brands are able to instantly respond to customer complaints and eradicate customer pain points before they can cause damage.”

Personalize Customer Communications. “By studying customer demographics, online browsing behaviors, purchasing habits, and social interactions, CRMs facilitate customer segmentation to a finer degree, which allows a brand to better determine how it approaches each customer.”

 

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Lawson Addins is not working with ADFS

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You have ADFS setup on your server but addins is not working though the user is setup in Lawson with the proper security and addins flag enabled.

Steps to resolve:

  1. First make sure you have the proper URL in Addins
  2. ADFS is more strict so in most cases a secured port is required
  3. If your login is failing with this login box below, ADFS may not be authenticating correctly.
  4. Include port as seen in this example URL https://servername.organization-domain.com:1447
  5. The login box will appear differently as seen below:
  6. If your still having issue and the login page does nothing once the proper credentials are entered. Verify the user has a Thick Client identity assigned in Lawson Security Administrator.

TIP: The password for the thick client identity can be anything. As long as it is filled, it should allow ADFS to authenticate with addins. Good luck!

 

John Keells Logistics Optimizes Operations Visibility with Infor

Sri Lankan logistics giant John Keells Logistics will leverage Infor WMS warehouse management system and Infor Birst to digitize and optimize its logistics value chain, enhancing the visibility of its logistics operations, optimizing costs and increasing productivity. Per the press release, John Keells Logistics will utilize Infor WMS and Infor Birst intelligence and analytics solutions to automate most of its business functions. This will enable the company to enhance business efficiencies and productivity and thus improve its bottom line. JKLL’s Chief Executive Officer Randula Chandrarathne says of the tech giant, “What sets Infor’s solution apart from other competing offerings is the company’s deep logistics expertise and industry-specific capabilities. With this solution, we can now automate previously labor-intensive and time-consuming processes, thereby improving productivity and optimizing costs.”

 

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Kingspan Water and Energy UK Standardizes on Infor

Kingspan has successfully deployed Infor LN enterprise resource planning (ERP) to help improve customer service, reduce inventory and accelerate the integration of new acquisitions to further grow their company. Infor LN is now live for 500 users across 11 sites across Ireland, Northern Ireland and England, and was achieved with no disruption to operations. Infor alliance partner Merino Services managed the deployment, which is hosted via Kingspan’s own private cloud. Per the press release, Kingspan chose Infor based on the strong multi-site and planning functionality within Infor LN, despite other companies in the Kingspan Group using different ERP technologies. Another critical aspect of this decision was Infor’s commercial flexibility and the depth of the support the vendor was able to offer. Infor LN will be complemented by Infor CPQ configure-price-quote solution, which will help allow product options to be intelligently selected at time of order entry, Infor Factory Track to help improve inventory movement and receipt of production, and Infor Birst for daily KPI monitoring. Kingspan’s field service organization, which is comprised of around 50 contractors and engineers, will use mobile service applications integrated into Infor LN.

 

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Bio Partner Schweiz AG Chooses Industry-Specific Multi-Tenant Cloud Solution from Infor

Bio Partner Schweiz AG recently chose to implement Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, replacing the current on-premise enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The CloudSuite will support the company’s continued growth by bringing many food industry-specific features to standard deployment and consolidate internal processes. The implementation will be done by Infor alliance partner Maximum Solution Consulting Group GmbH (MSC). Per the press release, the company has experienced strong growth in recent years in line with the trend towards organic and sustainable food — and accordingly the challenges facing the business have increased, particularly in terms of working with customers and additional value-added opportunities. The previous ERP system was no longer able to keep up with their growth, thus switching to Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage to meet the needs of the food and beverage industry, providing a range of features to help streamline global supply chains and accelerate processes.

 

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PR160 and PR180 Ern2 Record exceeded limit size

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When Running PR160 or PR180 you may run into the error Ern2 Record exceeded limit size:

This is known to occur when the Earnings Record is blank on the Laser Print tab

  1. Update the Earnings Record parameter in PR160 or PR180.
  2. Rerun PR140.
    • If PR160/PR180 gives an error of still running, restart PR00 by hitting delete function twice in PR00 to clear out * and R flags.
  3. Run PR160 or PR180 again and verify Earnings Record field is filled with a value.

5 Reasons Why You Should Choose a Cloud CRM for Your Business

Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the most important tools for  businesses today. In the last few years cloud technology has revolutionized the way data is stored and shared. CRM vendors have adopted the cloud to their systems, making for a more efficient program. Akhilesh Kumar Nandwana, vice president of business applications at Synoptek, shares an article on My Tech Decisions why you should implement a cloud-based CRM for your business. Here are a few key cloud CRM benefits for any business.

  1. Cost Efficient. “Moving to a cloud-based CRM is a financially sound decision. It saves a huge, upfront investment on the infrastructure and allows the organization to outsource the maintenance work to a consultant at a fixed cost.
  2. Anywhere, Anytime Access. “Unlike on-premises CRM, the cloud-based CRM allows access to data from anywhere round-the-clock.”
  3. Always Up-to-date. “Automatic updates in the cloud ensure that the CRM is always up-to-date with the latest features, including the latest security patches.
  4. Flexible. “With cloud-based CRM tools, organizations can buy tailor-made solutions specific to their needs.”
  5. Easy Installation and Support. “A modern cloud CRM can be installed in significantly less time. The only requirement is to have good internet connectivity.”

 

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Four ways a CRM can improve marketing campaign success

Dale Murray, CEO of SalesAgility, shares an article on CustomerThink four ways a customer relationship management (CRM) system can improve and make your marketing campaign a success. Content generated by marketing teams often produce the most impressions for a business. Social media posts, email marketing and daily interaction with customers/audiences drives traffic and interest to your firm, all while building relationships along the way. Murray shares how CRM software can greatly improve your changes for marketing campaign success.

Know what makes your audience ‘tick’ – “It is essential for your marketing team to know their audience in order to create content that they will engage with. With a CRM system in place, customer data is collected and presented from a companywide view including omnichannel touchpoints.”

Send the right message at the right time – “Segmented audiences now held within your CRM system, can be leveraged by your teams to deliver personalized and targeted marketing messages. Sending the right message to the right customer at the right time will reinforce a strong message of understanding and Marketing campaign engagement rates will increase.”

Manage marketing preferences – “Key system automations and workflows will clean your data sets for you, reducing the probability of human error. Should a customer opt-out of marketing communication, the system will deal with this accordingly. Invalid email addresses are removed automatically from data segments using CRM. Further ensuring that the data your team is working from, is as clean and reliable as it possibly can be.”

Knowing what works – “Marketing campaigns and their associated success will feed your company’s CRM system with valuable insights. Marketing messaging sent to customers will be tracked and analyzed to determine future segmentation. The system is constantly collecting data, using it to make informed data-driven decisions.”

 

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Evaluating Your Business Growth Goals And How ERP Can Help

Forbes writer Joel Patterson has been in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) industry for more than twenty years, and has learned the important role business software plays in successful firms. No two companies have the same needs so no two ERP systems can offer the same capabilities. Patterson shares an article describing the best approach to utilizing the best ERP system by evaluating the firm’s past, present and future goals. Per the article, he asks business owners to ask themselves the following questions:

  • Learn from your past. What were your past business goals? Were you able to achieve those with your current systems and processes? Identify the elements of your business that have previously held you back.
  • Analyze the present. Take stock of your current system. Is it equipped to handle your growth goals easily? What will happen if you make a strategic decision to acquire a business in a new industry? Is your system scalable and capable of supporting new processes and/or products? Does it allow you to quickly access data from across all silos of your business, giving you a birds-eye view of your operation with up-to-the-minute accuracy?
  • Dream for the future. Once you’ve assessed the situation, it’s time to look towards the future. What are your goals for the coming years? Is your business prepared to grow into its potential?

Once you consider the answers/needs to these questions, Patterson believes you can plan for a better ERP system in place at your business. One important key is having the right team behind you (i.e. your IT department and your implementation partner). Adjusting to a new ERP system is a trying process, so it’s important to work with a team you can trust, have easy communication with, and can understand your unique business needs. The right ERP system can be a game changer for your business so choosing and implementing will take time.

 

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Disabling a user in Lawson Infor Security Services vs Lawson Security Administration

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Disabling a user in ISS vs LSA is pretty straight forward, however there are differences explained below.

When disabling a user in Lawson ISS, there is no “IsDisabled” field under the LSF tab as seen below:

So when disabling a user in ISS, you simply go to the top left and click on “Disable Actor”:

Once the page loads, search for the user again and you’ll notice the Disable Actor button is now called “Enabled Resource” (this is how you re-enable a user in ISS):

In LSA, you simply query the user >> Edit RM Information and set the “is disabled?” field to YES or NO:

The one advantage of disabling a user in LSA over ISS is that when you run certain user reports (custom or native), the disabled field actually shows YES or NO. This can be helpful to know when reviewing user security or running audits. (This can change in the future so please note this may not be the case anymore after this articles date).