Integration for a Customer-Centric View.

Today’s small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) see a need for automating their
front-office sales and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to their backoffice
accounting and financial systems. The most recent trend for meeting this need
within customer-centric organizations is front-to-back-office integration. The goal of
integration is to provide a complete view of all customer interactions in order to make
more insightful business decisions.

This white paper provides a valuable list of factors for executive management, IT
decision makers, and sales professionals to consider when planning a successful
integration project. The paper also addresses the latest developments in software
technology that can impact your organization; a project overview of a typical
integration initiative using Sage Software products as an example; and the
capabilities, benefits, and return on investment that an integrated front- and backoffice
solution can provide for your organization.

Customer-Centric Integration Defined
In order for CRM to work effectively, individual departments within the organization
must communicate and have access to centralized customer information. Each
department who contributes to the customer’s total experience performs different daily
tasks that can be categorized as one of the following:
• back-office
• front-office

Each department collects customer information at different stages of customer
interaction. Traditionally, departments performing front-office tasks use dissimilar tools
to manage customer information than those departments performing back-office
tasks. For example, sales, marketing, and support staffs use applications that support
customer-facing processes, such as marketing to prospects, tracking sales
opportunities, and handling customer service and technical support inquiries. On the
other hand, back-office staff use applications that support non-customer-facing
processes, such as managing customer and vendor histories, processing orders,
storing financial records, and reporting sales requires.

Therefore, the goal of integrating the front and back office is to deliver native, best-ofbreed
product functionality to each department, while providing access to critical
customer and business information across the entire organization. When executed
properly, integration results in increased productivity and efficiency across all
departments, enhanced customer satisfaction and, ultimately, greater profitability.
For clarification, integration, as discussed in this white paper, is defined as sharing
customer information across organizational divisions or boundaries with a primary
focus on sales and customer-facing departments interfacing with the accounting and
operations delivery departments.

Register to get the full white paper here.