Customer satisfaction drives profitability, especially in today’s highly competitive services industry. To stay ahead of the competition, businesses need an integrated system that will provide a powerful 360-degree view of customers’ activities.
Stephen Corrigan, MD of Palladium Business Solutions, says Acumatica is the answer. “The goal in customer service is simply to deliver the service on-time and on-budget while avoiding surprises like unexpected additional charges. Acumatica can help tackle the issues of customer relations and productivity simultaneously.”
“Equip your team with the best tools available – comprehensive and integrated management applications, with workflow, document management, mobile access, and role-specific dashboards. You’ll find those tools and more in the Acumatica solution for the services and projects-based industries,” he explains.
Providing modern tools to the staff plays an important role in job satisfaction by easing the reporting and administrative burden while enabling ready access to information that service providers need to do their jobs effectively.
Automating sales, marketing, and service processes, integrated with financials, provides the tools to efficiently and effectively handle customer relationships while increasing the productivity of everyone involved.
Customers will appreciate and reward one’s ability to uncover problems early, prevent delays, and keep costs in line while providing a more responsive service experience. For simple and straightforward service work, Acumatica provides a simple order entry and billing process using unique order types.
“Set up and modify the workflows and approvals to immediately integrate with the accounts receivable, general ledger, and financial reporting,” he adds.
For project-based services firms, including engineering or those in the construction industry, the Project Accounting application manages budgeting, time sheets and disbursements, billing, profitability, and reporting for projects. Additionally, for business services of a customer support nature, the Service and Support Automation functionality in Acumatica effectively handles service-based activities, including case management, contract management and even prospect or tender management.
Corrigan says for repair and maintenance services firms handling warranty or billable parts requiring stocking inventory, Acumatica supports the requisitioning, purchasing, warehousing as well as invoicing with recurring and specialised billing requirements.
Acumatica’s embedded document management functionality ensures complete compliance with the impending POPI Act with the complete management and control of all document revisions, ensuring that all changes are tracked to ensure strict corporate governance compliance.
“Whether you specialise in long-term, complex projects or short turnaround jobs, you succeed by acquiring and maintaining clients while ensuring that projects/jobs are executed profitably. It all starts with managing relationships and making your deadlines. Competing on value is necessary, but the real challenge is to be better than the competition at ongoing relationship management,” he adds.
Acumatica is comprehensive and completely integrated, it provides accurate history and costs for past and current projects, for quality control and more intelligent bidding, resulting in more projects and higher profits.
“A services business is all about the professional staff – keeping them billable and productive, and managing turnover. Acumatica can help with both by providing timely and accurate information that gets the right people assigned to the right project at the right time to keep customers happy and billable hours high,” says Corrigan.
Maximise your income by providing productivity tools that increase job satisfaction and reduce unproductive time usage.
Improved decision-making with self-service BI tools and dashboards that increase productivity by enabling users to uncover information lost in the data – and doing it efficiently without waiting for IT or data specialists to develop the analysis. Additionally, Acumatica leverages the new Microsoft Power BI as its self-service analytical toolset with its Odata connection.
“Self-service paralytics can empower users in so many different ways, especially when supported by a cloud data hub, it fosters a larger, more active user base that will make better decisions and disseminate insight across all lines of business,” he concludes.
