When you embed project service management (PSM) into your CRM, you can access data that a stand-alone PSM application cannot, leading to improved efficiency, optimized service delivery, and a higher customer lifetime value.
In this blog, we discuss why your PSM should be part of your CRM.
What it Means to Embed PSM into CRM
When you embed your PSM into your CRM system, you unify the relevant and important data that maximizes customer lifetime value. Your PSM system collects a customer’s existing data, including lead generation, opportunity scoring, and the eventual closing of business wins. At the same time, your CRM system boosts customer-specific records with an array of data specific to the PSM, including:
- Active projects
- Task information
- Resources
- Schedules
- Costs
- Billings
- Expenses
- Contracts
- Issues
With this additional project information linked to your customers’ CRM records, employees at all levels of your organization gain valuable insights and can make better decisions regarding each customer. Assume that one of your sales reps can see the status of a customer’s ongoing service engagement, for example. Based on that data, the rep can determine a course of action – if data is positive, they can pursue new business in the form of cross-selling and upselling opportunities. If the data is negative, however, maybe because the customer is having issues with a deployment, the sales rep can offer assistance with resolving the issues or wait for a more appropriate time to discuss other potential opportunities.
Similarly, your management team can access high-level reports that aggregate data across accounts to gain a better understanding of resource utilization and profitability. With that data, management can either ‘stay the course’ or adjust policies to maximize profits, customer retention, and any other strategic metrics they seek to prioritize.
Improve Customer Lifetime Value While Gaining Efficiencies
Having all relevant data about a customer in one place helps avoid costly relationship blunders. Your customer-facing teams improve customer experiences by leveraging permission-based access to comprehensive data. For example, a salesperson in Europe may call about your U.S.-based customer’s Germany division and leverage your existing relationship to gain a foothold in Germany. The point is this: everyone in your organization is ‘in the know’ with enough data and insights to optimize new and existing customer relationships.
Embedding a PSM into your CRM also starts you down the road to increased efficiencies. From the outset, you eliminate information silos and gain considerable resource savings. Your people no longer need to manually input data into multiple systems and struggle to extract multiple data sets from multiple systems to complete their tasks. Or build a report. Instead, they access one unified set of data that has been input once but which can be reported on and analyzed for multiple purposes.
In the end, embedding a PSM into your CRM means your customer data is richer than ever before because it includes a broad range of combined data, allowing your teams to perform more complete – and more complex – account analyses and discover opportunities that were previously unnoticeable. With these new insights, they’ll improve customer relationships and drive higher, long-term lifetime value from each customer.
To learn more about the benefits of this strategy, visit our web page dedicated to embedding TimeLinx PSM into either Infor CRM or Sage CRM or contact us to engage with one of our PSM-CRM experts.
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About TimeLinx
TimeLinx delivers innovative project & service management software as a complete solution that perfects the sell-track-manage-support-bill cycle that services organizations must have to delight their customers; TimeLinx brings the cycle together in a single application that offers less frustration, better project management, complete reporting, and improved profitability – all specially designed for Infor and Sage.
