Using Excel Alternative to get Customer Insights
Businesses are increasingly dealing with vast amounts of data to help understand and predict customer behavior. And everyone’s top choice for expanding their enterprises is now employing Excel alternative.
For example Hire a Taxi business like Uber.
They have large data of customers that moves every hour.
The consumer of today expects to be treated as an individual and in order to gain their loyalty and trust, businesses have to keep up with customer expectations.
Gaining customer insights has traditionally been done using MS Excel, where pie charts and tables together went into the creation of dashboards to help companies stay on track in terms of customer expectations.
Excel options allow for data to be presented in traditional ways using a data analyst who then converts data into meaningful presentations for companies to better make sense of consumer thinking.
Problems with Excel include the limitations of analyzing big data and using it to build more exciting relationships with the consumer.
Using Excel has worked for small amounts of data from limited sources, such as for a retail store that only processes transactions done by customer walk-ins.
However, given the increasing complexity of this data and the variety of sources – e.g.: social media – using Excel is no longer the only method.
Today, companies are increasingly looking to use of an alternative to Excel that will help them overcome issues with Excel and get more meaningful analysis of data.
And these Excel alternatives include
Google Sheets,
MS Excel Online,
Apache OpenOffice,
Zoho Sheet with a ton more.
Today, though, I’d like to discuss Excel alternatives, which are far more intelligent, dynamic, and tailored than anything we can imagine.
Need of Excel Alternative for Businesses
We required dynamic systems to handle everything more quickly, more efficiently, and without error due to extensive commercialization and dynamic inventions in nearly every industry on a worldwide scale.
No, I’m not referring to the robots.
They are unquestionably the finest machines that humans have ever created.
However, I’m referring about a computer program or application that may be used in this situation as an Excel substitute.
The following are the most significant causes that prompted our search for the finest Excel alternatives:
- Accessibility
- Large Data Management
- Error Free System
- Easy to Use
- Total Automation
- Third Party Integrations
- Scalability
- Data Backup
- Password Protected Secure Data
- Advance Analytics
Accessibility
Most companies today operate internationally and cater to clientele from across the world. And while doing so, the company’s owners or senior executives frequently travel to manage these commercial activities.
And implementing Excel to operate such a business would result in a significant constraint.
In this situation, a system that can be accessed from any location with internet connectivity was necessary.
Real-time management was required for tasks including accepting customer input, responding to their inquiries, tracking their transactions, and many more.
Since today’s data is managed in real time and owing to smartphones, everything is managed on the move, Excel alternatives have completely altered the scene of all these processes.
By doing so, data updates are prevented from being delayed, making it easier and easier to serve customers.
This has significantly aided the enterprises’ expansion plans and increase in sales.
Large Data Management
Serving numerous clients as a result of business development necessitates maintaining the extensive data pertaining to these consumers.
Due to several restrictions on data separation and the interconnection of the services and products they are affiliated with, handling huge amounts of data using Excel was not practicable.
Due to this, handling the billing and corporate finances became difficult, which cost the time and money.
Upselling and cross-selling have been simpler as a result of the existing market situation for data management systems.
The process of retaining current customers and the goods and services that go along with them has been so thoroughly simplified that the service providers now know more than the customers.
These Excel alternatives also aided in the management of lead generation efforts and prospective clients’ needs.
The management of previous purchases, payment history, product upgrades, new requirements, ticket history, and many other things are in place to handle it more efficiently, and it unquestionably produces excellent customer satisfaction.
Additionally, thanks to the systems’ well-managed data system, when employees change jobs or departments at your company, they are able to interpret enormous amounts of data more simply.
And thus accepting a new job or responsibility doesn’t cause dissatisfaction.
Employees also save time since such systems are self-explanatory, which is advantageous for firms.
Error Free System
Calculations, formulas, macros, and several other related components make up the core of Excel.
Furthermore, every time you make a new sheet, you have to remember all the formulas, and if something doesn’t function or compute right, it might take hours to figure out the problem.
The amount of time the employees squander in this manner negatively impacts the employers’ ability to build their firm.
However, today we have error-free systems that operate without a hitch at all times thanks to Excel alternatives like numerous office management software applications.
Even if the job or computation is difficult, these systems can complete it with a single click.
This may make people’s life simpler and, instead of wasting time fixing mistakes, employees can be productive by taking on more responsibilities than they were assigned to, which will undoubtedly be good for the company and the owner.
Systems without errors speed up business operations overall and increase employee productivity.
This generates a favorable atmosphere in the workplace, which leads to effective customer service and further accelerates business growth.
While the system’s occasional errors cause annoyance and boredom in the workplace, delay in operations and projects costs businesses money, and small enterprises occasionally perish in this storm.
Easy to Use
The Excel alternative has everyone’s hearts because to their wealth of useful features and ability to tackle any complicated operation with a single click.
These apps are packed with features and essentially manage all facets of a business’ operations.
However, even non-technical staff may easily use and comprehend these massive systems.
Therefore, it is simple to master such a system or teach your team how to use it.
Additionally, these systems follow the most common business practices in the way they are built.
When utilizing such software, the system automatically offers you with the next necessary action once you finish the first stage of a business flow, and so on.
In this manner, you may follow the necessary business flow without having to recall numerous details.
Because of this, non-technical staff members can also readily comprehend it and are content to work on such a system without any complaints.
Each employee can then provide their very best effort in order to meet the daily targets.
And everyone may contribute to a force that generates a significant profit for enterprises to go to the next level of success.
Using Excel Alternative for Total Automation
Excel alternatives are nearly totally automated, thus they quickly do practically all jobs.
In order to ensure that business operations go well, it also has the ability to give clients regular reminders.
These alerts may include ones for services, late payments, renewals, upgrades, new product releases, and a number of other things.
Businesses no longer need to regularly engage additional staff to perform this manual task due to its automation.
Because Excel lacked this level of automation, organizations had to constantly employ staff to conduct this manual task, raising their expenses.
Additionally, the procedure would be rather drawn out.
In the past, staff members would phone clients to remind them of upcoming launches, renewals, or other developments.
However, when they were unable to reach the customer, they were forced to try calling them again a day or two later, or perhaps even again after that.
The most typical company operations would be delayed as a result. Additionally, the business owners would suffer a loss.
In order to be swift and best in this cutthroat day, automation is the need of the hour.
The organization will profit from increased overall speed and the ability to leave its imprint on the world stage through automation with Excel Alternative in every area.
Third Party Integrations
The workforce had to utilize numerous systems in the past to manage various business activities because Excel did not have the capability to interact with other crucial office applications.
The list continues on and on and includes email clients, accounting software, chat applications, telephones, social media, payment gateways, document storage, inventory management, and so forth.
The employees needed to comprehend many systems in order to perform a range of business operations.
But unexpectedly, since Excel alternative has been developed, all of these tools may now be smoothly incorporated using the API.
The main problem in the firms was thus resolved.
The personnel was no longer required to use several systems for various tasks.
Additionally, it enables company owners to save time and money because managing a variety of systems is a laborious task that requires several man hours to execute.
Additionally, staff members frequently feel overworked and consider switching employment, which costs any business owner money.
Excel Alternative for Scalability
Excel fell well short of all expectations when it came to scalability. Without a question, it still meets the needs of many small business owners for the fundamental data administration tasks.
However, they are unable to think further since it is not at all scalable.
It implies that you must become used to whatever features and functionalities it provides.
And over the course of many years, a lot of businesses lost money, a lot of them didn’t think to expand, a lot of them shut down, a lot of them made compromises, and a lot of them just accepted it and lived with it.
However, thanks to a number of cutting-edge Excel alternatives, this situation has entirely altered, and no longer must any firms compromise or close down since there isn’t a comprehensive system in place to manage various company processes.
These systems are just amazing since they are unrestricted in any way. It is possible to act on ideas just by thinking about them.
Such systems are so flexible and completely scalable that anything can be done with them, and the addition of AI (Artificial Intelligence) has made them seem unreal.
And with the advent of industry 5.0, it has been operating at an unprecedented level.
Every ten years, new improvements to these technologies are developed, making all industries self-sufficient.
Data Backup
Any organization’s foundation is its data.
If it is correctly kept, the organization will eventually stand higher; otherwise, businesses can falter.
Despite being used for many business purposes, Excel did not have the capability to backup your data.
And people would manually take the files, keeping duplicate copies on a different hard drive.
And in this fashion, they would take the back every day or every week.
However, as we are all aware, time is money, and this manual method was both time-consuming and maybe frustrating for the workers.
Additionally, the inability to do this manual backup and the subsequent system failure might result in a major disaster for the business owners.
However, we may credit the Excel substitutes that have emerged in recent years and come with the data backup function.
Having every piece of data and record automatically backed up on a daily or weekly basis prevented numerous firms from going out of business.
Our lives are now simpler, and data backup has protected businesses from disruption and the loss of crucial customer details.
Password Protected Secure Data
Login access, sharing access, file management, encrypted passwords, two-factor authentication, and other features should be standard in every software.
These are the components that guard against misuse or hacking of our data.
Data storage best practices are one thing, but it’s as crucial to protect your data against hackers and misuse.
And several Excel alternatives have added capabilities like these to their applications, attracting a large number of customers.
Therefore, you cannot access these applications or the data they contain without using your unique login credentials.
When a user connects to the system and accesses any type of data, these systems record that activity.
These insights into login history enable business owners to monitor all of their users and their system activity.
Advance Analytics
Businesses now have a method to execute their data assets and enhance their value thanks to advanced analytics.
Use of advanced analytics or business intelligence may be part of it.
Getting value out of data is a feasible approach for many firms.
Regardless of whether the data is real-time data produced by business operations or database-stored data.
Using advanced analytics tools enables businesses to build on knowledge discovery to anticipate the likelihood of future events.
As a result, business outcomes are more reliable.
Traditional backward reporting cannot address the more complicated business issues that advanced analytics can.
Excel and other such tools made this kind of analytics nearly impossible.
Businesses had a difficult time producing dynamic values and outcomes because these systems were not dynamic.
As a result, creating new strategies and diversions was always risky, therefore many companies were reluctant to do it.
However, not any more because the most popular Excel alternatives have made everything possible.
See How My Company Can Massively Automate Your Company Departments
Custom CRM Development – For Organizations to manage its Customer Interactions in addition to Sales, Marketing, Billing, Products, Services, Contacts, Customer Support, among other things.
Custom ERP Development – For Manufacturers to handle BOM, Quotation, Order, RFQ, PO, SOA, Manufacturing, Trading, Inventory, Quality Control, Logistics, Shipments, and so on.
Custom CRM as an Excel Alternative
Custom CRM software is getting more popular as an Excel alternative.
A professional CRM developer may assist with the development of CRM from beginning. CRM development from scratch can help businesses to:
- Minimize churn by identifying which customers are most likely to leave and why
- Pick out the right demographic for a targeted campaign
- Identify top trends that can target the socially savvy customer
- Segregate customers into groups based on their characteristics
- Maximize cross-selling and up-selling of personalized products to consumers
Excel frequently experiences issues when working with massive data, which is where CRM developers might be of assistance.
CRM development refers to the process through which CRM software developers produce an application.
And organizations can use this application to manage their customer interactions.
Good software of this type provides an Excel alternative and enables businesses to measure client insights without any issues.
Businesses may use a well-designed CRM solution to evaluate the data they’ve collected from various channels.
Additionally, it will offer a layer of analytics, allowing you to assess client sentiment and interact with them in new ways.
The use of custom CRM development can help businesses overcome issues with Excel, such as licensing costs and data limitations.
You can ensure that you are accurately converting your data into relevant consumer insights.
And you may achieve this by actively seeking for alternatives to Excel and paying a CRM software developer money.
Please do explore all your alternative Excel options before you choose the right CRM solution for your business.
If you have found this article useful, please share it with your peers who may also be seeking similar advice.
In the comments box below, please share your experience with custom CRM solutions.
Custom ERP as an Excel Alternative
Excel’s limitations are frequently reached by growing enterprises, which necessitates the use of a more potent management tool.
That capability can be offered by and especially adapted to business requirements by custom ERP software.
This makes it a fantastic option to Excel, which is less customizable and unable to manage the volume of data that a business wants.
Real-time data reporting and analysis, which may provide firms a competitive edge, are elements that custom ERP can offer that Excel does not.
The need for specialized ERP solutions that may serve as a substitute for Microsoft Excel is rising as the software’s usage rises.
Excel is a fantastic management tool for small firms, but it’s not made for bigger businesses. Here’s where specialized ERP solutions come in.
Organizations are utilizing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to coordinate and manage their company operations.
These systems may be used to manage supply chain, manufacturing, financial, and human resource processes. ERP systems may assist businesses in increasing productivity and efficiency.
To address the unique requirements of a business, custom ERP systems are created.
They are far more scalable and adaptable than Excel and can offer a variety of advantages, such as:
- Majorly enhanced data security
- Improvements in data management
- An increase in organizational data visibility
- Better ability to make decisions
Excel is used by plenty of organizations for things like maintaining customer data, tracking inventory, and figuring out sales patterns.
MS Excel, on the other hand, is not a specialist enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution and lacks many of the features that companies require to run their operations successfully.
Excel cannot compare to the flexibility and customizability of custom ERP software, which can be tailored to the unique demands of a firm.
ERP is undoubtedly something to think about if you’re searching for a more capable option than Excel.
Learn more about the services we can provide for your company by speaking with us.
Get in touch with us if you wish to create a CRM or an ERP system for your business.