Companies and organisations are managing more and more complex contracts. Whether it is the production of capital goods, the provision of services or the planning of major projects, a contract is the basis for each of these business transactions. Contracts define time periods, deadlines, rights, obligations and costs in a binding manner. These can be employment and rental contracts, contracts with customers or suppliers, licensing, partner agreements and much more. This means that many people and departments in a company come into contact with contracts – from service to support to marketing. Intelligent contract lifecycle management (CLM) helps to proactively manage contracts with the aim of generating the greatest possible benefit from the content for all parties involved and ensuring comprehensive security. In other words, it is not so much a question of managing the documents, but rather of integrating contract components, content and clauses securely and in a coordinated manner into the company’s processes.

7 phases of Contract Lifecycle Management

The process of intelligent contract lifecycle management is divided into seven key phases: Planning, Implementation, Pre-contract, Handover, Contract, Pre-renewal and Post-contract.

1. Planning phase – In this phase, you develop your CLM strategy based on your organisation’s needs and resources.
2. Implementation phase – This is where you build your contract management process to implement your strategy, ensuring that everyone involved in the process understands the goals and is familiar with the tools they will use throughout the process
3. Pre-contract phase – In this phase, contracts are drafted, negotiated and signed
4. Handover Phase – Once the contract is signed, you need to ensure that all stakeholders have the necessary information to manage the signed agreement and that all important details such as roles and responsibilities, obligations, and contract milestones are addressed
5. Contract phase – This is one of the most important phases in the contract management process, where those responsible for managing the contract track key milestones and commitments, monitor performance, and ensure the contract is delivering the intended results
6. Pre-contract renewal phase – This phase evaluates the overall performance of the contract and decides whether to terminate, renegotiate or renew the contract
7. Post-Contract Phase – Now that the contract has expired, the post-contract phase is the time to ensure that all terms and conditions have been met and to resolve any final ambiguities before conducting a contract follow-up to help you improve in the future.

CLM is thus not only a system that helps the legal department and lawyers in the company to draw up contracts more quickly and securely. Setting up cross-departmental and Group-wide contract management is a great opportunity to support all divisions, departments, subsidiaries and other organisational units in their contractual work, but it also enables active risk management, the implementation of corporate governance and compliance rules, reveals potential for marketing and sales, and ensures the greatest possible transparency.

Benefits of CLM software

There are a number of contract lifecycle management softwares on the market. They help you automate and simplify the contract lifecycle, while ensuring that you comply with corporate policies. In any case, you should make sure that the software you choose meets the following points:

Save time and standardise contract creation

Contract lifecycle management software automates and standardises tasks such as contract creation, approvals, signature collection, contract renewals, and reporting. This frees up time for you and your team to focus on the things that make a difference.

Simplify negotiations

Easily track and manage contract terms, redact edits, and maintain a single source of information between multiple parties. This gives you a clear view of your company’s obligations and simplifies the negotiation process.

Streamline contract approvals

By automating tasks such as routing and notification, you can be confident that contracts are approved in a timely and efficient manner.

Improve security and compliance

By providing a central document repository for all contracts in your organisation, contract lifecycle management software helps you improve security and compliance. This helps you keep track of important deadlines, renewals, and amendments.

Reduce administrative costs

By automating repetitive tasks and improving efficiency, software can help reduce the overall costs associated with contract administration.

Mitigate risk and reduce contract non-compliance.

Good software helps you ensure that all items are on the credit side. It can also help you ensure that only the people who need to access the contract have access to it.

Keep an overview and search for and find important contracts

Finding the right contract among thousands can take a lot of time. Good software is like a magnet for your contracts – you don’t have to spend time searching through endless pages of documents, but let the documents come to you.

Better and automated reporting

Standardised report templates are difficult to configure for your specific needs. Smart contract management software can analyse reporting metrics to give you the most relevant information when you need it.

Contract management solutions such as proCONTRACTS take over the process of contract creation, template management, reconciliation and archiving as well as the automatic evaluations of conditions, prices and risks. All this is available to employees and departments at the push of a button. They thus provide a complete overview of all contracts and conditions, ensure faster processes through automated workflows and standardised modules, and enable deadlines and obligations to be met reliably. This applies to individual contractual obligations as well as obligations arising from data protection laws such as retention and deletion periods. So today, an intelligent and secure software solution for managing contracts is not only a real booster in terms of corporate processes, it is in fact a fundamental success factor for exploiting all the potential that contracts offer.

Success factor: Seamless integration into existing systems

When introducing a software solution for digital contract management, the seamless integration of or into other systems is crucial. The proCONTRACTS solution scores here with its integration into Microsoft Dynamics 365. This means that all data and analyses, for example from marketing, sales or service, are available, and customer data, analyses or forecasts can flow into and be linked with contract evaluation and design. And vice versa, of course. Customers, partners and suppliers can be viewed comprehensively with a 360-degree view.

The resulting opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration lead to significant increases in sales, greater customer loyalty and higher success rates. Based on the data, better forecasts and more reliable predictions can be made, and offers, whether service, product or contract, can be tailored more individually to customers, partners and suppliers. This increases customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The bottom line: A contract management solution like proCONTRACTS is not only a real added value for the contract departments in the companies due to the easy integration into the Microsoft Dynamics world, it is an important building block for everyone in the company to tap new potentials, minimise risks and accelerate business processes.

Successful customer relations – which company doesn’t aim for it? But they don’t happen on their own, they require a lot of detailed work, perseverance and a well planned strategy. In this article, we look at the aspects that companies need to address, in order to foster and sustain successful and long term customer relationships.

To begin with: Do you know the book „Alles außer gewöhnlich„? It was published in 2007 – Anja Förster and Peter Kreuz sharply analyse the German economy. Their conclusion: It’s not enough to simply reel off one’s products and services. It needs to be clever ideas and innovations, that aren’t ordinary. This is still true today and especially important for building successful customer relations. It’s not only about developing new channels, campaigns or occasions, but rather about intelligently managing the different channels and touchpoints that companies can use to engage with their customers. It is crucial that all departments in a company work together and share information transparently – from sales to support to customer service.

Identify your customer touchpoints

Losing and replacing an existing customer can be 5 to 25 times more expensive than keeping existing customers. With this in mind, it is essential to understand the experiences of customers who have left, in order to learn how to prevent similar losses in the future. First: Identify your customer touchpoints. You will find them throughout the customer journey, which usually includes several stages:

• Perception
• Evaluation
• Purchase
• Usage
• Repeat purchase and recommendation

These customer experiences (CX), form a holistic concept that includes every interaction between customers and the company – from initial brand awareness to the present moment. This is relevant for all services or experiences provided before, during and after the purchase. Customer experience as a concept, has evolved from the increasing commercialisation of services. It’s the next step in the shift from a product industry to a service industry, which has become an industry of ‚experiences‘. The result? Customers have higher expectations of experiences and services. They want every company to deliver quickly and with the same level of personalisation and variety.

Everyone in the company is responsible for successful customer relations

The basis for developing successful customer relations is a well organised CRM system that is anchored within the company. Only the basis! Because the people, the employees of a company who maintain this data and work with it, must be able to operate the CRM system as quickly and intuitively as possible. Only when the CRM system is part of the corporate philosophy and in the hearts of the users, it will be able to be used efficiently for building successful and long-term customer relations.

Customer journey must start with the management team. If the management team is convinced of the positive impact of a CX programme, the transformation can take place throughout the organisation and in all departments. Diverse departments such as IT, marketing, customer service and HR need to work together to develop and implement strategies and drive change throughout the organisation. Some companies have created a team of customer experience experts to help integrate the strategies across each department.

A new trend is to extend the customer experience to the company’s employees to align customer experience and employee experience (EX). Although, these two elements are often considered as two separate entities, the link between customer and employee satisfaction is undeniable! Companies are striving to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, but staff shortages and high turnover rates mean that companies are more interested in employee satisfaction than ever. Basically, the connection between employee satisfaction and economic success is quite clear: Satisfied employees make for satisfied customers.

Use software intelligently and properly

Even the best software can only fully develop its benefits, if it’s used correctly. Any software only serves a tool in the beginning, that must be brought to life by the people who use it. So, it’s not just a matter of rolling out software, but rather of implementing the CRM system, precisely defining the procedures, studying processes, defining and, if necessary, adapting the goals and requirements. Every company, including their culture and strategies, is different, so the software – the CRM system – must also be individually adapted to each company.

The best and easiest way is to select, adapt and expand the relevant functionalities from a CRM system, that has already been used and tested many times. The result is a CRM, that is individually tailored to the company’s requirements. Behind the system, there are years of experience, a high level of consulting services and expertise on industries and markets. Make sure that these gaps in experience are closed and only rely on a service provider who brings all these aspects to the table. So it’s not only the users, but the entire team, especially developers and consultants, who create the basis for successful customer relations with a well organised and intelligent CRM system.

5 tips for successful customer relations

In summary, there are some tips you should follow to maintain and advance your customer relations:

1. Maintain and optimise your data management

A consistent, up-to-date and well-maintained database is a must-have for a targeted customer approach, that is adapted to the respective situation. An intelligent CRM system forms the basis, so that employees can maintain, manage and expand data with pleasure, intuitively and in a guided manner.

2. Set no limits to your customer journey

Think about your own holiday. When does it leave an all-round successful impression? When everything fits, from the arrival to the accommodation to the weather. It’s the same with your customers. If the purchase is satisfactory but not the service, you get negative feedbackback. That’s why you need to make sure that all departments work together, communicate relevant information transparently and are able to guide your customers comprehensively.

3. Leading the way at management level

Successful customer relations must be anchored, lived and thought about in the entire company, especially in the management team. If management doesn’t see customer centricity as a guiding principle, even the most sophisticated CRM system will be of little help. Make sure that the management team rolls out the transformation throughout the organisation and in all departments. Transparent communication is the key!

4. Measure customer experience

It is important to be able to measure customer satisfaction. On the one hand, to assess the success of the measures and improve them if necessary, on the other hand, as an incentive and justification for measures. Intelligent live dashboards and reporting functions that can be shared company-wide, help to evaluate measures and to act proactively. The better you understand your own customers, the more targeted you can work on successful customer relations.

5. Transparency and communication are key

The friendly receptionist, the courteous service employee on the phone, the It-person in the support centre – they can all do a good job. But if just one of them doesn’t take the job seriously or falls out of line, the relationship with the customer will suffer. This can happen, but it should remain the exception. Therefore: A successful customer relationship is the responsibility of each individual in the company and must be guided and lived by the values and ideals of the company.

Customer experience is more than just a trend. Management – and everyone else in the company – must be aware of the impact that positive (or negative) experiences can have on customer relations. The customer experience affects customer satisfaction, loyalty, the likelihood that they will recommend your business to others, and ultimately the likelihood that customers will remain your customers. Indirectly, it also influences your employee experience and leads to higher engagement.

Would you like to learn more about how you can implement successful customer relations with your CRM system? We are happy to invite you to a personal dialogue or to a digital coffee. Schedule your appointment here, we look forward to hearing from you!