Tag Archive for: managed data integration solution

Top 5 Benefits of Data Integration

Businesses of all sizes want to ride the high tide of digital transformation and disruptive tech. With this, the various departments within the business expand, and oftentimes they each have their own set of software requirements. This results in various software platforms for collecting and managing different data points within these departments.

It all looks good, initially, the new approach to data acquisition. Until it’s not.

Inefficiencies start to creep in.

Siloed data across systems is a problem for your business, and data integration across systems is a smart approach to turn the “boo” of dealing with disjointed systems into a “boom.”

Smart businesses are connected. They use the art of data integration to have a holistic view of the health of their business, top-notch customer satisfaction levels, and make data-driven decisions.

Let’s learn more about why your ERP (accounting and operations software) needs to be integrated with your CRM.

Top 5 Benefits of Data Integration

Saving Time, Effort, and Money

Time is money, and so is the effort invested in tasks that shouldn’t be done manually. How’s your team using time? 

You don’t want your teams to waste countless (and billable) hours digging into different systems, trying to find information about a single customer. Manual data entry leaves room for outdated data and errors.

So much so, in a paper published by business professor Raymond R. Panko, he mentions that the probability of errors in manual data entry can be as high as 40%.

This is a massive problem for you and your employees! Integrating your ERP and CRM takes away the chances of errors, saves time and effort, and reduces your expenses.

Have a Single Source of Truth

Siloed data across multiple systems don’t allow the singular view of customer and business data as each system has its own interface and reporting. Hinging the chances of single customer view and real-time reporting: Two of the most important elements for effective business decisions.

Data shows that 64% of customers will jump to a new competitor following a poor customer experience.

By having a single source of truth for all your customer’s data, you can deliver higher customer satisfaction levels through personalization, quick responses, and solutions as your team have the needed information at hand.

And real-time reporting allows you to be proactive and prepare for the future.

As a result – integrating your ERP (Accounting and Operations) with your CRM using Commercient SYNC leads to improved brand image and data-driven decision-making.

Reduce Bottlenecks

Disparate systems lead to slowdowns and inefficiencies. When information is scattered, communication channels between departments are poor, things don’t get done, and more problems are created.

For instance, your finance department is responsible for allocating the budget to your marketing department but is unaware of the last quarter’s marketing budget allocation utilization. Result – the management-approved budget allocation is not optimal and is either less or more than required. Now both departments need to go back and forth – to get the new and accurate budget approved.

Another example: sales are down and salespeople need customer information to find out which customers haven’t placed orders in the last month or quarter, so they can call them and find out why. The problem: the sales department can’t access that data because it’s only in the ERP. 

Such delays and unnecessary steps can be avoided if the ERP and CRM systems are connected in the first place. Making integration an important component…to reduce bottlenecks and make efforts in marketing, sales, and customer service departments more effective.

Make your Business Scalable

Integration unleashes the power of automation by removing labor-intensive tasks, like building API connectors, manually performing SQL queries and creating reports.

Data process automation takes away these burdensome tasks and increases scalability. For instance, the manual building of the API connectors takes months to build, leading to extensive delays. The plug and play functionality of integration platforms like the Commercient SYNC takes these away.

Additionally, integrating your systems automates tasks like transforming data for quicker reporting, removing bad or duplicate data, and fetching data from different systems.

Increase Revenue

A connected business means all your departments can work together to achieve more. This collaborative teamwork leads to improved channels of communication and reduces delays and duplication of efforts.

Additionally, the automation of tasks and streamlining of processes exponentially reduce costs by eliminating menial activities. Your sales and other teams can focus on their primary tasks.

And as mentioned above, an integrated system creates a solid brand image which indirectly improves sales. And this integration of your ERP software with your CRM software increases your revenue and profitability by reducing costs.

Integrate Your ERP Data with CRM, and Build a Robust Growth System

Considering these benefits of data integration, you might agree with us that it has a crucial role in smooth and seamless functioning of your business. And to stay ahead of your competitors, you need to stay ahead of the game: That’s what makes data integration important. And a successful integration can be achieved with a specialist like Commercient SYNC. Talk to us today to know more.

Commercient Attended Zoholics 2022 in Mexico

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Zoho customers and partners gathered in Mexico City in November 2022, and as Zoho Partner, Commercient had to be there, too! Our solutions engineer Rebeca Oliva assisted #ZoholicsMX2022 in Mexico City. She met many amazing people, made valuable #connections, and learned a lot about what’s new and coming for Zoho in 2023.

Zoholics is Zoho’s conference series, where they share product updates, educate customers, and announce game-changing new product releases. It also allows attendees to meet Zoho’s team face-to-face and learn directly from the staff behind their apps. Zoholics offers:

-Informative Product Briefings 

-Personal 1-on-1 Sessions 

-Networking & Fun

So we interviewed Rebeca Oliva about her experience at this event, and here’s what she has to say about Zoho and the integration apps Commercient develops to connect our client’s Zoho CRM with their ERP accounting system:

Learn more about the Zoho and ERP integration

Click here to see the Zoho CRM integrations.

Why did Commercient attend Zoholics?

We are expanding our strategic partnership with Zoho LATAM, so when they invited us to Zoholics, we decided it was time to go. We also wanted more information about what’s new with Zoho and their plans for the future.

We wanted to connect with Zoho implementation partners and users from Mexico and Latin America. As part of the Commercient Sales team, the goal was to bring all the knowledge we could to use as a sales tool as part of our data integration services. For example, Zoho Analytics allows data analysis, showing data on reports and dashboards that as of now, come from different sources (both internal and external).

Any takeaways you’d like to share?

Many partners are committed to Zoho and looking for ways to enhance growth together.

Zoho’s interface is intuitive and robust, as it has access to more than 50 apps within the Zoho ecosystem.

The Zoho team was kind, friendly, and respectful. All attendants could see how passionate Zoho’s staff is regarding the solutions they provide for their clients and the plans ahead.

Many were pioneers when Zoho decided to break into the Latin American market.

Learnings 

News on Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Development, Operations, Productivity, and Collaboration.

What’s coming in 2023.

Zoho’s Values and how they strengthen their work in terms of investment, security, innovation, privacy, and an ecosystem that includes clients, partners, and employees.

Investments so they develop or improve the best apps in the market.

Opportunities

We connected with Zoho partners in Mexico and other countries that may be interested in partnering with Commercient to offer an integration between Zoho and more than 110 ERPs.

There were in-person meetings with Commercient partners before the event.

We received the recommendation to integrate Aspel SAE and Contpaq in Mexico. 

They also recommended working on an integration for Zoho Books Mexico, one of their newest products.

I met with the Zoho LATAM team and discussed how to strengthen our partnership in Mexico and Latin America to help more companies that need to connect Zoho CRM and the different apps in Zoho One.

We planned Business Development strategies to bring Zoho and Commercient SYNC in front of more potential customers in a more effective way.

Questions about how you can connect Zoho CRM, Zoho Books, Zoho Analytics and more to +110 ERP accounting systems? Contact us today to discuss your data integration needs.

Solving the Costs Of Double Data Entry

In this new landscape of growing tech to automate tasks and increase efficiency, you will come across plenty of software to use.

And, like most of us, you think your business is sorted after purchasing various software to do different tasks.

This is great until it isn’t. Using different types of software can cause data inaccuracy, or your staff spends more time entering data twice. Because these systems don’t work together, one customer’s record is duplicated by the other, often manually and with errors.

Data is critical to the optimal functioning of your business. For any decision or its impact, it’s the data that shows the story behind it or the reason for it. However, if that data is incorrect or is siloed across systems, the whole point of data-driven, targeted decision-making is in vain.

And that’s not all…

Double data entry has the power to disrupt your business as it has enormous costs attached to it. Let’s break down some of those, and understand why you need to solve this problem as soon as possible.

How Much Double Data Entry Is Costing You?

Productivity Costs

Pipedrive’s report on the State of Sales mentions that a staggering 47% of respondents cited that selling is not their main activity. Indicating how much time salespeople waste on tasks like entering data into multiple systems.

Imagine your sales team being part of those statistics. Their time is being caught up in wasteful activities instead of selling; less selling means less revenue and profits for your business.

Severely impacting productivity.

It’s not just them.

So are the customer reps in your company. With scattered data – a by-product of double data entry, they must go through multiple records of the same customer to answer simple queries. Or your marketing team emails the same information to the customer three to four times.

A massive waste of time and effort. And ultimately, unhappy and annoyed customers. That’s why poor data quality due to double data entries is a severe productivity killer that needs to be tamed before it costs you, your company, and your customers heavily.

Costly Errors

We are humans. There are always chances of errors sticking around. Like they say, to err is to be human. 

And these errors can creep in when you or your subordinates enter data manually into different systems of record.

To put it in context: For a distribution company where 4.7% of the records have incorrect addresses and who ships about a million packages a year, it implies 47,000 packages shipped to the wrong addresses.

That’s just one case in point. Wrong phone numbers, incorrect names, and any other erroneous information critical to customer conversion, satisfaction, and retention can put a dent in your team’s efforts.

Customer Experience Costs

A satisfied customer is a crucial driver of growth in every business. Satisfaction stems from delightful experiences. Experiences which they have had, such as when they ordered for the first time, when they had a problem to resolve, or when it was a question that they couldn’t find answers to.

And one bad experience sets them back.

In fact, in a report by Verint, the Customer Engagement Company, 64% of the respondents said that they jumped to a competitor following a poor customer experience.

And a significant cause of poor customer experience is poor quality of data which is a consequence of double data entries.

Asking your customers to hold the line for 5-10 minutes while you search for a record, or being unable to resolve their problems is a poor customer experience at best, possibly losing that customer. 

The most damaging characteristic of brand loyalty is the amount of effort needed to get a resolution (34%), followed by long hold times (25%) and bad bot experiences (22%), as reported by Verint’s The 2022 State of Digital Customer Experience.

And we all know keeping positive brand recognition requires effort and is difficult to recover after a bad experience.

However, there is good news: The solution to the double data entry problem lies in Data Integration.

So, How Can Data Integration Reduce the Costs of Double Data Entry?

Data integration, through companies like Commercient SYNC, will connect your disjointed systems, your Accounting ERP, and your CRM systems. Instead of working in silos, your sales, marketing, and customer service teams can have access to the same data in the ERP and the CRM. 

This will solve the problem of each department or individual entering their own information, decreasing the chances of errors. Everyone has a 360-degree view of sales, customers, and marketing.

Information entered in one software will reflect in another in real-time, reducing discrepancies. Data consistency will lead to significant savings in time and effort, increasing productivity. 

As when one employee enters information, it will reflect for others, and your customer-facing employees will have accurate information at their disposal – decreasing their response time from minutes to seconds.

Imagine if integrating your data saves your salesperson 40% of his or her time. That means 40% more time to close deals! An 8-hour workday means your sales executive has an additional 192 minutes. 

Over the course of a week, that’s 960 minutes, and if we take the whole year into account, that adds up to about 49,920 minutes more to convert. Now multiply these with each of your sales representatives. That’s a lot of time saved!

That’s the power of having consistent data, streamlining your processes, and making your business work as a single unit by using powerful ERP and CRM data integration tools like Commercient SYNC.

And when you look at the big picture here, it also means reducing the potential of human errors, which leads to a positive customer experience.

Positive experiences will lead to improved brand perception and satisfied, loyal customers.

It’s About Taking the Steps

The problem and costs of double data entry and incorrect data arising from it are persistent across industries and sectors. Whatever your niche may be, you are not shielded from it. In order to protect your business from the issues of erroneous double data entries and improve efficiencies, taking steps to mitigate is your only solution. 

Investing in data integration software like Commercient SYNC will help you resolve double data entry problems. As always, It’s about increasing profits while reducing costs.

The Pros and Cons of ETL Toolsets vs. Managed Data Integration Solutions 

In the rapidly shifting world of data, software, cloud computing, machine learning, and technology, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of ETL toolsets and managed data integration solutions can be difficult.

However, choosing the right tools based on your specific needs is crucial and can lead to competitive advantages, time, and cost savings. In the following, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons of both to help you make an informed decision for your business requirements.

Data Integration Advantages

1. It helps businesses gain insights into their data, both current and old.

2. Consolidates data to make viewing and analyzing easier.

3. Helps improve productivity.

4. Improves data accuracy and compliance.

When companies want to connect systems, there are options such as ETL toolsets and managed data integration apps. Below, you’ll find more information about both:

What are ETL Toolsets? 

In short, ETL is an acronym for Extract, Transform, and Load. For many businesses, the necessary data to run the company comes from a variety of sources. This can include accounting and HR data, CRM, marketing, and sales records, to name a few. In order to bring all of that data together into a centralized database, it must be extracted from the sources, then transformed, cleaned up, or prepared, and finally loaded into your database.

As with any data integration option, there are advantages to keeping all of that information in more than one system. However, in the case of ETL toolsets, there are some cons to consider:

1. Take a lot of time to understand and set up.
2. You are responsible for dealing with issues and fixing them; no support is provided.
3. Hard to keep up and maintain.
4. It is not ideal for near real-time or on-demand data access, where fast response is required.
5. Much more expensive in terms of time and money in the longer term.

What are Managed Data Integrations?

Managed data integration refers to the solution provided by a vendor like Commercient who brings together necessary IT infrastructure and technology, along with implementation and maintenance of those tools.

Rather than a company utilizing staff resources to take on this critical role in-house, many businesses both large and small prefer to have an expert team manage these data processes.

The Benefits of Commercient’s Managed Data Integration Solutions 

Although ETL toolsets can be a viable solution for some, the cons, including the expensive costs, difficult set up and maintenance processes, and lack of support, steer many to look at other options. In these cases, pre-built and managed data integration often makes the most sense for numerous reasons:

Rapid Deployment and Easy Setup: We handle the setup, providing you with a holistic view of your data quickly.

Lower Costs: You will save not only time but also money in the long run, as our expert support provides immediate results.

More Flexibility and Customizations: We will tailor and customize your integration based on your specific goals and objectives.

Amazing Support: Our knowledgeable staff supports your every need, from setup to troubleshooting and ongoing maintenance.

To recap, managed data integration from Commercient is a preferred choice for many businesses that are considering ETL toolsets as an alternative. Our SYNC apps are the fastest, simplest and most flexible solutions for your sales, service, marketing, and customer success teams. And most importantly, we eliminate the need for third-party toolkits for a quick and easy integration experience. Contact us today to discuss your data integration needs.