Customer relationship management (CRM) is considered to be a practice and strategy where the organisations use it to retain, identify, acquire, and delight their profitable customers by constructing and sustaining a long-term relationship with them.
CRM for Construction and Facilities Management is about managing not only their customers, but also their contractors, projects, and more. Facilities management organisations consist of multiple disciplines that must coordinate to ensure that all people, processes, places, and technologies across the business are all integrated. And that is no easy task.
So how exactly do CRMs work to aid in this process in the case of construction and facilities management services? We’ve broken it down for you below.
Multiple sites across a wide geographic area will require good management of people as much as materials to ensure margins are preserved and all parties know what is expected of them. Each stage of each project needs to be well managed so that invoices can go out. Key dates can be made visible automatically to all parties so the entire workforce understand the need to urgency and accuracy, not just the select few.
Whilst this sounds simple to those with experience as a draftsperson or the like, it can also be a great mystery which leads to confusion and projects running behind schedule or invoices not being sent at the earliest opportunity.
Daily tasks can be automatically sent out to by email with a CRM to ensure there can be no misunderstanding, and dashboards can be provided to show the stage of each and every job at a glance.
When you contact a supplier or member of staff you can see at a glance how many other projects they are associated with and the stage of that project, apply these efficiencies across your team, and easily see that nothing is going to slip through the cracks and cause a problem later on. Almost any CRM for construction system can work if you can adapt it to how your team works.
If you have a more customer-focused role, then a self-service portal could be of value. One example could be where tenants raise jobs for staff to assign to engineers with predetermined rules and automated reporting back to the landlord so they know which jobs are open, closed, or outside of the SLA agreement.
Staff can now pick up their next job without needing to call the office and drawings can be accessed on site without the need to waste journeys or costly print runs.
Mobile device access via a CRM means that your team can access and manage key information in real time, wherever they are.
Unless you have a means to constantly keep your brand in front of the buyers, sometimes your firm will be forgotten. Putting together short periodic reminders such as a well-presented newsletters or marketing updates is simple with a CRM. They allow you to track who opened each email, which article they clicked on, etc. which is all valuable information when it comes to better learning the needs of your customers. Having the right tools makes it simple to retain mindshare where it’s needed.
Through a CRM, one can build better communication within the company because one can share data between different departments that will further enable one to work as a team. This also help to further optimise the customer experience.
There are also added benefits like improvement in customer retention, optimisation of marketing, and gaining valuable insight.
As implied in the above content, there are a myriad of benefits that come along with implementing a CRM in the construction and facilities management industries. Not only do they help in growing business and adding revenue, but they make work elements easier and more accessible to employees and the management team.
Any questions? We have the experience to have your system up and running and adapted to your needs in a short time frame. Get in touch with us below! You can also learn more in our free, in-depth guide here.
