Manage your international customers with Oryanoo CRM
Managing customer relations with several subsidiaries in France and abroad can sometimes be a challenge. Every sales representative needs to have access to all the information about their customers. The company therefore needs a CRM capable of integrating all these parameters. Oryanoo CRM has been developed specifically to address these issues. Read all our reviews of CRM solutions.
International customer relations: what's changing for you?
Expanding your business beyond your own borders is not automatic. Certain critical aspects of customer relationship management and business management need to be taken into account:
1. Cultural approach and language
Wherever you go, the local culture will be different from that of the country where your head office is located. Cultural factors are very important in your internationalisation strategy. In practical terms, you need to use the local language as often as possible (sales presentations, knowledge, software interface) to leave no doubt as to the relevance of your marketing and sales approach. It is often noted that the sales cycle is different from one country to another. Your software should therefore enable you to create a sales cycle by country to optimise your sales pipeline and chances of success.
2. Market size
Markets are not the same size from one country to another, and they do not have the same capacity to absorb your offer. If we compare the United States with France, the population is 5 times larger and the economy more dynamic, so sales can take on a completely different scale on the other side of the Atlantic. The KPIs you use to measure your performance must therefore not be the same, otherwise the information you get from your dashboards will simply be wrong.
3. Team building
The creation of a new sales force needs to be integrated into the group as a whole, but it also needs to be isolated so that sales performance can be read accurately. Your CRM must therefore allow you to create separate teams on several sites with different interface languages.
4. Sharing and compartmentalising knowledge
Just as you need to create several teams, you also need to create separate knowledge management areas. This involves translating sales presentations, quotation templates, email templates, etc. into each language (and each country) and distributing them to the teams. This can be done via a document management space dedicated to each location as well as a common space. The common area generally contains all "corporate" documents such as communication media and internal procedures.
5. Managing product and service prices
The CRM must manage the main currencies: Euro, Dollar, Yen, Pound Sterling and Yuan in order to do business in each country. Many CRMs do not specify on their site that they only manage one currency (often either the Euro or the Dollar). Ideally, you should have a price list for each country to take account of differences in products, services, prices and currencies.
6. Global and local reporting
The advantage of a multi-site CRM is that you can concentrate all your marketing and sales data in a single piece of software. As a result, you need to have at hand a global dashboard enabling you to manage the group's activity, as well as local dashboards to measure and compare the individual performance of each site.
A priority for multi-site management: server synchronisation
When an SME has several sites in France or abroad, all users need to have permanent access to the CRM. Take, for example, a company with one site in France and one in the United States. If the server at one of the subsidiaries goes down, the business still has to continue. This is what Oryanoo CRM has planned for. If the French subsidiary's server goes down, Oryanoo 's server synchronisation function will automatically "switch" French users to the American subsidiary's server. They can then continue to work and enter information into the CRM.
In the same way, when the French site's server becomes available again, all the data entered on the American server by the French users will be automatically synchronised on the server in France. Thanks to Oryanoo, the servers in each subsidiary communicate with each other in real time to ensure seamless maintenance.
Multilingual CRM to facilitate working with subsidiaries
When you're managing international sites, you regularly have to make the big leap between having a global view of your business and a local approach to customer relations. This implies having a CRM capable of making information available in the language of the users. The Oryanoo CRM has taken this into account: it is available in 6 languages.
Employees of a German subsidiary will therefore have access to the application interface in German. The CRM also allows for the possibility of a language not being available. Oryanoo, for example, is not yet fully translated into Chinese. In this case, employees of a subsidiary in China will use CRM in English. Of course, all the local settings will still be available: local currencies, properties specific to Chinese customers, and so on. And this will not prevent Chinese customers from receiving quotes or invoices in their own language. In fact, Oryanoo enables language settings to be made at both user account and customer level. The language of communication with the customer is chosen in the customer file. This means that an employee can use the customer relations software in one language but produce documents in another.
This multilingual approach means that information can be shared as effectively as possible between the different subsidiaries. A user in the United States will be able to consult information entered by a French employee. They will have access to all the information in the language in which their account is set up, i.e. English. This feature is particularly effective for managing international teams. All sales staff, whatever their nationality, have access to all information in their own language. This makes it much easier for them to communicate with each other.
Personalised data
The primary aim of a CRM is to facilitate customer relations. To achieve this, customer files are made available in the software. However, it often happens that these default fields are not sufficient. At best, users will be provided with a field such as "miscellaneous" or "other". The data entered in this field is so varied that it is difficult to filter or exploit.
What's more, in the case of a company with several international subsidiaries, these "catch-all" fields contain information in several languages. Exploiting them is a real headache! That's why the application includes fields that can be customised at will. Any user can add custom fields and information specific to their customers or markets. And as Oryanoo is specially designed for working in a subsidiary, users can name the new fields they create in their own language.
Best practices in customer relations
Conclusion
Managing customer relations effectively with several international subsidiaries means equipping yourself with effective tools. Starting with the right CRM: one that can synchronise information between the various sites and support several languages. The company's competitiveness and future sales depend on it.
Article translated from French