Ensure Your ERP System is Reducing Friction along your Customers’ Journey
An enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution isn’t just good for your business, it's also good for your customers. With the right ERP system in place, you will be able to improve your customer's experience across many touchpoints on their journey. To reduce friction negatively impacting customers, you must first understand and map their journey.
Your front-line team members work with customers on a variety of levels. Their ability to respond quickly to customer needs is a representation of your business that can either lead to more sales and faster, more effective service or to frustrated customers. The right ERP system can arm your people with tools and data to expedite their ability to make a sale, check on the status of an order, process returns, or to provide follow-up support. Responsiveness and accuracy will certainly improve the productivity of your employees and positively affect customer experience.
The Importance of Mapping the Customer Journey
Mapping the customer journey early will provide valuable information when defining priorities at the onset of the project and as the project moves forward. Understanding key touchpoints and soliciting customer feedback will provide actionable insight about how to improve their journey and where your new ERP can help. It could be a touchpoint needs to be better synchronized across channels or automated within the ERP. In other cases it's important to consider how well your front office and back office are integrated. The idea is to find ways to reduce friction along the customer's journey. Prioritize and focus on the most customer-relevant improvements you can make. You may consider common interactions, such as:
Can employees quickly determine inventory availability, without emailing or calling the warehouse manager?
When customers place an order, can employees offer accurate pricing without putting the customer on hold?
Will you be able to accelerate response times when handling customer returns, credits or other inquiries?
Are your customer invoices easy to read or do customers regularly call in with questions, possibly because the quote/order they received doesn't clearly correlate with the invoice they receive.
By breaking down organization and information silos, often due to disparate systems, you will be able to streamline these and other important processes supporting the customer journey. The right ERP solution can strengthen internal operations and play a large role in improving customer experience.
Contact us for help mapping your customer journey and other important tasks in the early stages of your ERP implementation project.
