This is how our customers plan their sales and service tours with SMARTCRM.GeoMap
SMARTCRM.GeoMap is completely flexible, which is why it may be used in many different ways. To make you understand how variable the module is actually, let us introduce you three illustrative application scenarios of our customers.
Example 1: Visit planning based on fixed standard tours
To prepare and to follow up the sales tours, one of our customers uses SMARTCRM.GeoMap in conjunction with SMARTCRM.TourPlanning. A feature, which allocates the addresses to a particular tour, has been attributed to all customers and prospective customers managed in SMARTCRM. For instance, when the headquarters of a customer are in Kandel, Germany, the feature “Tour South Germany” is then assigned to this address.
When calling up his tour “South Germany” in the CRM system, the employee automatically obtains a list of all addresses, which have received the feature of this tour. In addition, for these addresses, SMARTCRM displays the date of the last visit and provides other important information such as the current turnover, the order backlog or the indication related to an open quotations.
The addresses are then passed to a map of Bing Maps with a single click using SMARTCRM.GeoMap. Bing Maps visualizes the locations of the companies, their categorizations within the CRM system and the trend of their current sales revenue. On this basis, the employee can decide with which companies and in which order he wants to start the next tour. Bing Maps visualizes the route to be travelled and provides further information such as travel time and details on the itinerary. When the route is planned, the customers and prospective customers to be visited are transferred back to SMARTCRM with a single click. The CRM solution creates then an appointment for the tour on the planned day – or if required, individual appointments per customer – and stores activities of the type “scheduled visit” in the corresponding address file of the customer respectively prospective customer.
Coming back from the tour, the field service employees can call up the tour planning again. There, they can switch to the “scheduled visits” and document the visits.
Example 2: Visit planning depending on the calendar weeks with SMARTCRM.GeoMap
The second example shows how the tour can be managed in a completely different way: here, a SMARTCRM customer does not assign addresses to fixed routes. Instead, the sales employees agree with their customers in which calendar week the next appointment should take place and set a task as a reminder in the Organizer. On this basis, the sales employee has at a glance displayed in a SMART Board overview which company under his responsibility is expecting him in the following weeks.
With a click, the addresses are exported to Bing Maps and a daily itinerary is generated for each day of the week. Thus all tours for the whole are prepared in no time.
Then, the employee transfers the information back to SMARTCRM, where an appointment is automatically created for each day of the week in his Organizer as well as the activities for the “scheduled visits” in the corresponding customer files.
Once the tour has been completed, the sales employees can directly switch back to the activity in their Organizer appointment and enter the visit report. By using one of our mobile solution, they can also document the visit report right after the appointment.
Example 3: Visit planning and service with SMARTCRM.GeoMap
SMARTCRM also supports the service department with tour planning and management. More specifically, the service employees see the next agreed service appointment as well as the machines with due maintenance on SMARTCRM’s start screen. The employees transfer these customer addresses with just one click to Bing Maps and plan there their maintenance visits for the respective days. SMARTCRM automatically creates an appointment and an activity for each route or for each customer. If, for instance, tasks are sent to back office colleagues or new service orders are entered as a result of the appointment, the service employees can directly send them using the mobile solutions from SMARTCRM. When the tour is completed, they can switch back to the activity and document their service reports.
These examples show how differently our customers plan their tours in SMARTCRM and how SMARTCRM can adjust to the respective requirements and processes in sales and service. In the near future, the users can look forward to another functionality: sales territories will be displayed on a color-coded basis in Bing Maps, so it will be clear at a glance which address lies in which territory. If only the addresses of his own sales territory are to be viewed, then an employee can transfer the addresses of all customers he supervises from the SMART Board to Bing Maps with one click and see there the corresponding sales figures as well as the date of the last visit.
SMARTCRM in sales means to recognize potentials and seize opportunities. It forms the basis for identifying market trends at an early stage, generating prospective customers and gaining competitive advantage.
With SMARTCRM, you have all necessary machine or ticket information ready, can coordinate your service appointments and can keep track of everything even on the go.
