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Frequently
Asked Questions:
Why Do We Need A Customer
Relationship
Management System?
If you know that managing
your relationships with your customers is the key to growth - and
survival - then you also know that customer relationship management
doesn't support your business—in a very real sense, it is
your business!
The basic reasoning behind
customer relationship management systems is that every single point
of contact between one of your customers and one of your employees
is a "moment of truth" - an opportunity to either enhance
or detract from the overall experience of doing business with your organization. Every such moment of truth therefore needs to be as
smooth, pain-free, and seamless as possible. A key ingredient in
making that happen is to ensure that every one of your people that
comes into contact with a customer has access to information that is
relevant, accurate, up-to-date and complete.
Employing information
systems technology to optimise customer management in your organization is no longer optional. New technologies, such as
the Internet, are increasing demands upon customer service to new
levels. As customers embrace these new technologies, their
expectations regarding how and what they wish to buy and their
expectations for service and support are evolving. Organizations that are not using customer relationship management
systems will be at an increasing competitive disadvantage.
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Why Do We Need
Barracuda?
If you are looking for a
customer relationship management system that doesn't cost a king's ransom, or
need an army of techies and specialists to get it installed,
something that your staff will find easy to learn and use; a system
that runs on industry standard computer platforms and provides a
swag of functionality, then you probably need
Barracuda.
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What Will Barracuda Do For
Our Customers?
Your ability to take care
of your customers represents your organization's only truly
sustainable advantage in the marketplace.
Your customer's perception of your organization's ability to take care of them will be greatly enhanced
because Barracuda will help you organize and collect all information
pertinent to the customer, and make that information instantly
available to all of your people who deal with the customer - all the
way through the process from prospecting to sales, service, support,
and delivery. Your people will be able to look at information about
interests, preferences and complaints that a customer has expressed
to anyone in your organization.
Customers don't like to have to explain
the same thing over and over again, and tend to be somewhat
under-whelmed when, at the most crucial moment in their dealings
with your organization their preferences are overlooked. This
all too frequently leads to a souring of the relationship, heated
exchanges between the customer and your people, and a generally
unhappy state of affairs.
With Barracuda, your people are much less
likely to put the customer offside, and your sales and customer
service reps will experience far fewer nasty surprises (aka "shark
attacks") when calling on customers. They may even get to
enjoy praises and accolades - which is good news for customer
relations, and great for morale.
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What Will Barracuda Do For
Our Sales People?
Barracuda provides your sales people with
access to the information that they need to answer customer
questions and fulfil requests, automates tedious and time consuming
activities and generally reduces the lead time in converting
prospects to clients.
Barracuda features such as literature
fulfilment, proposal generation and electronic order processing all
help your team to shorten the sales cycle. Your sales people
will be well informed and supported, the astute customer will
appreciate their professionalism and the efficiencies achieved
through the underlying support system.
Your most effective sales people are
probably very busy - Barracuda will help them ensure that they never
forget another appointment, meeting or event.
And your most effective sales people are
probably very good communicators; not only with your customers but
also with your support and logistics personnel and your
managers. Barracuda helps them to communicate efficiently and
effectively - and that translates into sales.
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What Will Barracuda Do For
Our Marketing People?
Marketing personnel will
enjoy the benefits of a continually improving information base that
will provide accurate data to support slicing and dicing of the
customer base to identify segment dynamics and market
opportunities.
Using that data and
Barracuda's direct marketing campaign facilities, your marketing
people will be able to provide information about your organization
and your products and services to the right people - significantly
reducing the number of irritated recipients of wasted direct
marketing.
This will result in the
generation of better qualified leads that can be passed over to the
sales force for follow up.
Barracuda helps your
marketing and sales decision makers to track marketing actions
against marketplace results, and to analyse the buying behaviour of
customer segments so that decisions upon the selection and
development of new target markets are made upon and supported by
accurate data.
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What Will Barracuda Do For
Telemarketing?
Many organizations
recognise that each telemarketing campaign is different - each one
is tailored to a product or service offering, the unique needs of a
particular customer segment, a particular data collection
requirement.
Barracuda helps your
telemarketing people to create the telemarketing process you need
for each campaign; one-off or ongoing. This puts your
telemarketing people in control of the telemarketing process
ensuring accurate targeting, accurate data capture and the timely
routing of sales leads to the most appropriate sales team or
person.
You minimise wasted time
and resources and maximise return on your telemarketing campaign
investments.
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What Will Barracuda Do For
Sales Management?
Barracuda's database is a single data
repository which managers can use to monitor the sales pipeline and
identifying potential bottlenecks before they become a serious
problem.
Managers can implement security
arrangements that allow them to grant and remove access to specific
information within the database. Access can be granted to
sales people according to their needs, thus minimising
unnecessary exposure of data.
Barracuda helps to ensure a continuity of
service for your customers in the event of a sales person leaving
your organization.
Managing those complex "large accounts"
is much easier with Barracuda tracking all sales people, products,
services, pricing, suppliers, partners and competitors. All
customer contacts are tracked and management can monitor the
situation and ensure that your organization's efforts are
coordinated and cohesive.
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What Does Barracuda Do For
Planning And Forecasting?
Forecasting in some organizations often
relies more on instinct than intelligence - what somebody thinks
should happen, or desires to happen, coupled with some wishful
extrapolations from incomplete or dubious data. Other organizations are basing their forecasts on comprehensive data built
up by systematically tracking customers and segments.
Barracuda can take you from mystics and
chicken bones or outright guessing to accurate forecasting and
management decision making to be based on fact not intuition.
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What About
e-commerce?
The term "e-commerce" means
electronically enabled commerce - doing business via computing and
communications technologies - using Internet and
information systems technologies to build stronger business
relationships with your customers and partners.
It took 60 years for the telephone to
reach 50 percent of homes in the United States; it took the VCR only
12 years. Ubiquitous "web shopping" isn't going to happen
overnight, but it is happening.
Forecast statistics and guesstimates
abound - they fuelled the e-commerce gold rush at the turn of the
millenium.
E-business, e-commerce and web-based selling are changing the way we all do business, and influencing the
expectations of our customers. People expect instantaneous answers
to their questions.
Your sales and service
people have to know the answers - or where to find them - at all
times. They have to know all about your products and services,
what you have in stock, when you can get that product or service to
the customer, how much they are going to pay, and so on. And
if your organization can't provide answers in the customer's
timeframe, you are going to lose them to one of your competitors who
can.
The days of keeping
information in card indexes and filing cabinets, and relying on key
sales and logistics people are soon to be a thing of the past.
Improving your organizations business processes, pleasing your
customers, making sales and providing excellence in services means
moving to e-commerce systems.
Barracuda can help you take your organization into the e-commerce age and streamline your business
processes by automating tasks such as prospecting, proposal
generation, online quotations, literature fulfilment, contact
management and so on.
And while Barracuda makes communicating
with your customers at the speed of light through state-of-the-art
e-commerce facilities a breeze, it is equally at home with those old
fashioned letters, faxes, phone calls and meetings that so many
people still use in day-to-day commerce.
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Where Will Barracuda Help
Us Make Savings?
Barracuda makes customer
communications, enquiry handling and customer information access
easy for every member of your staff. This translates into
significant savings through improvements in efficiency and also
results in increased business throughput.
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What Will Barracuda Do For
Our Suppliers?
To provide
the quality services that attract customer loyalty, organizations
must be able to extend their service infrastructure into their
partners and vendors. Barracuda allows you to manage relationships
with partners and vendors as part of your organization's extended
enterprise - you can share information and support issues with
everyone that comes into contact with the
customer.
And because Barracuda
tracks all communications and contacts, supplier performance is
easily monitored.
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What Will Barracuda Do For
Our Competitors?
Nothing nice.
Barracuda helps your people monitor competitor products, services
and activities with your customers and in market
segments.
As your organization builds
up your competitor intelligence base you will be able to determine
where your competitors are applying resources and develop
appropriate strategies to counter their efforts.
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What About The Platform
Technology?
When deciding upon a
computing platform for Barracuda our research people wanted to be
sure that our customers would be able to run our software product on reliable, commercially available "consumer"
computers - cost-effective computing. And while Apple have some very fine products and
Linux is gaining ground, the Microsoft
Windows platform is still the clear winner when it comes to
cost-of-ownership.
There is little value to a
computer platform if you can't find software that runs on it. In
reality, developers have adopted Microsoft Windows for
much the same reason that the James Gang and Ned Kelly robbed banks
- it's where the money is. Windows is successful
because more customers buy it than any other platform, and that
leads to more developer investment and more products and services,
which in turn encourages more customers to buy the platform, and so
on.
Barracuda has been written
in Microsoft's Visual Basic, Microsoft's strategic Windows
application development toolset, and can be deployed with either the Microsoft Access
database management system, the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) or
Microsoft SQL Server as its underlying database.
Windows can be scaled in
size to meet the needs of most organizations - it works equally well
for a sole trader, a small business, a department, a division or an
entire big business corporation.
There are a couple of points
here that are quite important to any organization considering
Barracuda.
First of all, your business
development plans probably anticipate growth over the next few
years. If your systems can't grow with you, you will find
yourself held back by technology shortcomings, or throwing your
systems investment out and starting again.
Either way, you are
going to be spending time and money messing about with computer
systems rather than getting on with business. Barracuda on
Windows is a scaleable system, and that means your systems growth
path is assured.
Secondly, despite your best
efforts at planning and preparation, computer systems often grow in
unpredictable ways. You can never know for sure which
workstation or server is going to find itself struggling with the
workload - even if the overall growth of your operation is
predictable, the distribution of the computing workload probably
isn't. Barracuda on Windows lets you make adjustments and
changes without disrupting the entire structure of your company’s
information systems.
This means that an organization can start off with a single user implementation of
Barracuda running on a low-cost PC platform and expand that system into a
global network supporting hundreds of simultaneous users.
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What About Web Access?
Barracuda
is available as an 'on-demand' solution
and as an n-tier solutiuon.
The
Barracuda 'on-demand' hosted CRM solution is delivered
over the World Wide Web and is accessible from Internet
browsers.
The
Barracuda n-tier
solution is delivered through Microsoft Windows clients
and also has a web browser interface option that
allows authorised users and customers to access the Barracuda system through the Internet.
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What About
Reporting?
Barracuda's reporting facilities provide
standard reports and a general purpose query and report generation
facility with which users can create custom reports with any
information in the database and output them to screen, file, or
printer. Barracuda reports can also be exported into most
popular desktop applications, reporting and analysis
tools.
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What About Audit
Trail?
Barracuda includes full audit trail
features throughout the entire system. Authorised users can
use the audit logs to determine which user completed a data change
or update, which workstation they used and the date and time the
change was completed.
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What About The
Database?
Barracuda
can be deployed with either Microsoft Access, MSDE or
Microsoft SQL Server as the underlying database management
system.
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Is Barracuda Easy To
Use?
Barracuda is a Microsoft Windows-based
application that has been designed to be as easy to use as any other
quality Windows software system. Barracuda is capable of rapid
deployment for immediate productivity gains and will work with the
Windows desktop applications, hardware and software you already have
in place.
Barracuda has an easy-to-use interface
that ensures accurate information capture and reduces training.
Barracuda ships with example databases to help you ensure
that you are in production as soon as possible.
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Couldn't We Develop One
Ourselves?
You will need a development team that
includes engineers and designers with significant commercial systems
and customer relationship management systems experience, skilled Windows systems
and application programmers, systems testing and documentation
specialists. You will also need to allocate resources for ongoing
maintenance and enhancement of the resultant system. However,
if you do not want to fund a complete team of in-house experts to develop and maintain
your system, and if you do not want to spend months waiting for them
to design, program, prototype and test your customer management
system - try Barracuda.
You can be operational in a matter
of hours.
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Who Else Uses
Barracuda?
Barracuda is used by many different kinds
of organization in a wide range of industries. Any organization that sells technical products and provides specialist
maintenance and support services is a potential Barracuda
user.
Coral Sea Software uses Barracuda - so
please contact us if you want to check out how well an organization
using Barracuda can look after its customers.
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What Support Is
Available?
Coral Sea Software provides a range of
Barracuda customer support services. The standard maintenance
agreement provides Barracuda users with a fixed-price
service that includes access to all maintenance releases
and email support (unlimited incidents) for twelve (12)
months. Optional telephone support agreements are
also available.
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What About The
Future?
Predicting the future in
the information technology world is fraught with dangers, and the
landscape is littered with the corpses of individuals and organizations that "bet the farm" on some innovative new concept or
brilliant new technology that just didn't live up to its marketing
promises.
Established in 1985, Coral
Sea Software uses proven, commercially sound technologies to deliver
innovative software products for customers in selected
markets. We do not jump into the latest, greatest
technologies. We look for tried and tested tools to develop
reliable and cost-effective software products.
In an industry where
today's new wonder technology is either tomorrows success story or a
miserable and expensive failure, we prefer to wait a little while
until the wonder invention turns into a tangible product that we can
apply to improve the products we provide to our customers.
Cutting edge technology has a tendency to put early adopters onto a
"bleeding edge" that can consume considerable resources.
Our business is to produce
and support quality business software at an affordable price and our
customers business is to provide technology products and services to
their customers - neither of us can afford to entertain other
people's expensive experiments or tinker with technology initiatives
that may not work out.
Barracuda development is
driven by our customers, not by technology marketers. If the
people that use Barracuda to run their businesses want a feature -
they get it.
For
example, when a number of customers asked if we could make
Barracuda available as an 'on-demand' service we sat down
with them and worked out a solution - and now Barracuda is
available as a hosted CRM solution delivered over the
World Wide Web and accessible from an Internet browser at
a fixed price per user per month.
This means
that customers can deploy Barracuda quickly, easily, and
affordably, without any significant upfront IT
investments.
Talk to our
customers. Talk to us. Barracuda has a great
future.
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