Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management

• Sales Leads and Opportunities
• Pipeline Management
• Marketing Campaigns
• Calendar and Events
• Task Management
• Notes and Messages
• Document Management

The business benefits of automated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are simple. Better organization and insight into all relationships across the Prospect–to-Customer continuum can add powerfully to sales and customer satisfaction, as well as reduce document duplication and delays in quotations.

Our focus is on providing CRM software that is cost-effective for medium-sized businesses and readily usable. Like all of our software Abel CRM is installed as standard functionality. This reduces any additional installation or training time, and means Abel CRM is both familiar to your team and automatically connected to all your business operations.

Because Abel CRM is built in to Abel, you have complete visibility of the sales cycle from lead through opportunity, quote and order. You also have a complete picture of all communications with your clients from the very start of the sales cycle.

Abel CRM gives you a better insight into your customers, who ultimately are also your business.

Sales Pipeline

Using Abel CRM, your management and sales team share a single clear overview of every step in the sales cycle:

Leads

• Capture leads including demographic data, company data, estimated sale value and notes.
• Configure leads to capture extra data tailored to your businesses’ sales and marketing processes.
• Convert leads to opportunities and automatically create a new prospective client and contact (or link the opportunity to an existing client and contact).

Opportunities

• View your sales pipeline grouped by sales stages for an employee or a team.
• Use color coding to highlight high value opportunities.
• Create actionable tasks which can escalate to management when required.
• Use the opportunity agenda to see upcoming calendar events and tasks.
• Monitor the progress and conversion probability of each opportunity through user-defined stages.
• Automatically link correspondence, task history and calendar events to the opportunity, the client and the contact.
• Manage by exception: easily identify opportunities with overdue tasks or without booked calendar events.
• Provide multi-level visibility of the sales pipeline to sales managers and sales teams.

Sales

• Trace each sale back to its quote, opportunity and lead.
• Retain a history of all sales activity and communications for the client.

Abel CRM can help you grow your business by developing more accurately targeted sales and marketing campaigns based on analysis of existing sales data, business categories, customer interests and geographical locations.

By analyzing customer purchasing patterns you can generate organic sales and can more effectively build campaigns to up-sell or cross-sell using filters such as:

• Products purchased or not purchased (within a date range)
• Product categories purchased or not purchased (within a date range)
• Customer and Contact Categories
• Countries, States, Cities, Postcodes
• Account managers

Campaign Building

Abel CRM can help you grow your business by developing more accurate targeted sales and marketing campaigns based on analysis of existing sales data, business categories, customer interests and geographical locations.

By analyzing customer purchasing patterns you can generate organic sales and can more effectively build campaigns to up-sell or cross-sell using filters such as:

• Products purchased or not purchased (within a date range)
• Product categories purchased or not purchased (within a date range)
• Customer and Contact Categories
• Countries, States, Cities, Postcodes
• Account managers

Calendar

Employees can view or create events in Abel’s calendar with one click from most Abel screens. Abel’s calendar events are automatically linked to the opportunity, client and contact.

Abel’s Calendar enables you to:

• Easily view calendars for all employees within a team (with appropriate security permissions)
• Optionally set reminder notifications by popup and / or email.
• Classify events by a configurable event category
• View both Tasks and Events on the same calendar
• Use the calendar throughout Abel, not just within the CRM screens

Task Management

Abel’s Task Management tool allows you to easily manage individual or group tasks and collaborate with team members. It enables you to quickly and transparently identify, record and act on customer concerns. This all comes with built-in traceability, escalation and management visibility.

Abel Task Management features include:

• Smart-link tasks to a Client, Contact, Document, an external file, or even other task
• User-defined categories, actions and outcomes
• Stipulate whether actions and outcomes are required
• Automatic email notification preference for field personnel
• Enable escalation when a task’s predetermined status is not met on time or when a defined priority level is reached, enabling management assessment
• Ability to reassign tasks to one or more people, if security permits
• Expanded chronological view of tasks for a client, contact or document
• Viewable in an inbox, and calendar layout
• Tasks can be public or private. (Public tasks can be viewed by any user whereas private tasks are only available to task recipients and author)

Notes and Messages

Notes can be used to log user-defined activities against a customer, document, employee, inventory item or a user-defined item. Examples of using this include: logging phone calls, conversations, instructions, agreements, concerns and or general information.

Messages can be sent to one or multiple employees, and like Tasks, Notes and Emails, be smart-linked to key relevant records. Reminder notifications can be set for a received message or the author can create a reminder for all recipients.

Abel Email Interface

Abel’s Email Interface for Microsoft Outlook® enables you to import emails from Microsoft Outlook and store them in Abel. You can also reply to imported emails from within Abel, so that your email replies are automatically captured within Abel and automatically sent via Outlook.

Using Abel’s Email Interface, you can easily manage all those important email conversations that you need to track as part of doing business and providing good service. Because the emails and replies are stored within Abel, all staff (with appropriate security settings) have access to them for better management of your business relationships and processes such as purchasing and credit control.

You can use Abel’s Email Interface throughout Abel to record email exchanges that are important to your business including those with Customers, Suppliers, Prospects etc. You can also link the email to other things in Abel e.g. a particular Invoice, or a particular Inventory item. Each email can have multiple links within Abel. That way, an email can be viewed from all the places in Abel that it is relevant.

When you import an email, you can select the objects within Abel to link the email to e.g. a Customer, a Supplier, an Inventory Item, an Invoice etc. The object types available for linking are configured for each user in Abel’s User Preferences, so you can configure a set of email interface object types that is relevant to each user’s work.

The Abel Email Interface requires an Add-On license. Refer Licensing for more information.

Emailing Documents

All documents produced in Abel can be generated and emailed in PDF format and the email is automatically linked to the communications log for the Customer, Supplier or other Client receiving the email. For invoices and statements you can set a media preference per customer, and specify an email address, so that their invoices and statements will automatically use the email option and the pre-configured email address.

Abel’s emailing agent queues outbound emails and delivers them to your SMTP mail server asynchronously, using a maximum number of connections that you specify. This enables you to manage Abel’s demand on your SMTP server ensuring that emails are delivered to your SMTP server in a controlled fashion.

Abel’s email processing architecture ensures that even the largest statement or campaign run does not compromise your SMTP server’s performance or its availability to other applications. If your SMTP mail server is down or unreachable, Abel will hold the waiting outbound emails in its queue until they can be delivered to the SMTP server.

Abel’s emailing agent is included with your Abel Base Kit, so you do not need an additional license in order to use it.