When people speak of an enterprise-level company, they’re generally talking about large companies with a national or international presence. With multiple locations and potentially millions of customers, an enterprise business tends to have different operational needs compared to small and medium-sized businesses. This is where enterprise software comes in.
These are technological solutions intended for large organizations rather than individual customers. There are several different categories of enterprise software and different vendors who often specialize in each type. Here are some of the most important kinds of apps to help boost your productivity, keep you secure, and improve your bottom line.
Customer Relationship Management
You have no greater resource than your existing customers, and good CRM software makes it easier to serve them, store customer data, and gather insights into customer behavior. CRM helps your sales team by functioning as an intelligent contact list that stores data on leads and helps determine the exact position your team is with each potential client. It also helps your customer support agents work as efficiently as possible to offer the best customer service experience.
From a single dashboard, your agents can track conversations with customers across any communication channel, and artificial intelligence can bring simple calls to quick resolutions and route more complex calls to the best agent for the job. Eliminating common frustrations in customer support makes it easier to retain customers and can help spread positive word of mouth about your business.
Data Visualization
Visuals generally make it easier to process complex information, and data visualization softtware helps communicate data through graphics rather than numbers. The best data visualization tools are AI-enabled and can generate actionable insights through integrations with tools your business already uses. Data visualization solutions also help you improve enterprise reporting by enabling you to compile easily understandable data from multiple data sources and deliver insights relevant to your entire organization.
Data visualization comes in many forms including infographics, pie charts, bar charts, histograms, and graphs, so you have plenty of freedom in how you want to represent your data.
Market Research Information Systems
No business succeeds without market research, and while manually conducting customer surveys, interviews, and focus groups may be the best way to gather primary information, gathering secondary information manually is extremely time-consuming and unnecessary. With an MRIS, you can instantly find and analyze data from hundreds of sources including industry reports, information from government agencies, and reports from trade associations. An MRIS is a great tool to help your marketing team improve their decision making and create better strategies.
Objectives and Key Results
OKRs are a goal-setting management framework pioneered at IBM. The framework became much more well-known when it was brought to Google and helped the then relatively small company evolve into the tech giant everyone knows today. These days many successful companies including Amazon and Microsoft use OKR software to improve their businesses.
Your objectives are your overall goals for your company. These should be easily understandable, and it’s best to stick to just a few at a time. Increasing sales by 15% next quarter would be a good example.
Key results measure your progress toward your objectives. You can consider them similar to KPIs. If after one month, you had increased sales by 4% compared to last quarter, you’d know you’d need to step things up in the next two months to meet your objective. Key results help you determine whether your objectives are realistic and offer insights into how you can set better ones in the future. Overall OKRs are meant to boost efficiency, encourage participation among team members, and increase company transparency.
Competitive Intelligence
While business intelligence tools pull internal data to help you make more informed decisions, competitive intelligence tools are used to collect and analyze data regarding the entire market landscape. Gathering business data on your competitors helps your sales team react to price changes and other moves your competition is making. The best tools will let you study all of your competitors’ marketing efforts including their social media presence, PR efforts, and content marketing strategies. Combined with business intelligence tools, these technologies help you reach your target audience and offer them solutions that your competition can’t.