What do you expect from a customer relationship management, or CRM, system? Adopting one is about a lot more than simply organizing prospect and customer details. It’s a considerable shift in how your business operates.
Companies realize that technology is the single greatest challenge limiting their growth. Implementing business software is often long an painful. App proliferation and multiple user interface add to the pain.
In fact, the transition is so much easier when you focus your CRM implementation on the “how,” which is nearly as crucial as the “what.”
The “what” is what you expect CRM to do for your business. The “how’ is the way your CRM is implemented to achieve results that meet your expectations.
Bpm'online, whose out-of-box capabilities provide a way to accelerate implementation, knows that you can't expect exceptional customer relationships without powerful business processes that work. As a CRM partner, we know that business processes won't work unless the CRM implementation is done in a way that facilitates full adoption by your business.
It really does you no good to expect your CRM to deliver specific results, yet not have a CRM partner with the expertise to guide you through the “how,” a professional who will customize and implement your CRM system to meet those expectations.
Focus your strategy on the “how” in at least these three areas during implementation, and you’ll give yourself the greatest potential for success with your CRM
User Strategy
If you’re going to see CRM success, you’ll need to put some thought into how the people in your organization will use the system. How will implementing CRM affect the jobs that employees do? How can we ensure high user adoption?
You see, user adoption is critical to getting the expected results from your CRM. And here is the most important “how” to ask: How do we use CRM to make the jobs of users easier? Focusing on that answer will guide you and your CRM partner through implementation as it relates to user strategy.
By taking stock of the duties and needs of each user in your business as well as the current processes within your organization, you’ll gain the prerequisite knowledge of what needs to be implemented, and how, to make each user’s job easier.
How to implement CRM to make user's jobs easier:
- Integrate CRM with applications they already use internally whenever possible to make the system relevant.
- Personalize CRM to fit the way users already work by building it around current processes.
- Do not add anything unnecessary to CRM now or in the future. In other words, don’t complicate their jobs or give them reasons to abandon using CRM.
Customer Strategy
CRM’s entire purpose is to management your customer relationships in such a way that you strengthen them and experience business growth. Comparing what you know about your customers at implementation to your CRM expectations can reveal any existing gaps in service, especially when transitioning from a contact management system.
Three common but critical areas that usually reveal themselves are: inconsistent customer experiences, few customer insights, and the biggest of all, bad data. These are also three of the most important areas you must get right during implementation.
How to implement CRM to build more positive customer relationships:
- Choose a CRM partner who can customize features to provide tools to deliver the experience you want your customers to have.
- Use CRM metrics to drive improvements, both for users and customers. Implement CRM Reporting that offers insights into what matters most to your customers and your business goals.
- Import clean data. Make sure your CRM partner knows how to help you cleanse your data before importing it into your CRM software. Expect to understand how your data’s integrity will be maintained as it is migrated into a new CRM system.
Software Utilization Strategy
Your obvious goal is to have all the users in your business use your CRM to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively and by doing so to help grow your business. But how will your sales staff use CRM differently than your marketing department? Perhaps one department may need a screen or report that the other does not. Or maybe they need similar reports but value different information that is pertinent to their business unit.
The answer is CRM customization. Consider the organizational scope of your implementation project and how each role will specifically use CRM to do their jobs well
How to implement CRM for different uses: Ask these questions concerning CRM utilization in three major business areas.
- Sales & Development
- How will CRM make client communication more effective?
- How will a CRM capture and track leads?
- What reporting and metrics will the sales team need from CRM?
- Marketing
- How will CRM support the campaigns your business runs?
- What data is necessary for successful campaigns?
- How will the CRM track campaign metrics and results?
- Customer Service
- How will CRM document customer requests and complaints?
- How will customer service representatives track customer issues and proceed to resolution?
- What tools will customer service representatives need to meet service standards?
An experienced CRM professional can help you to scope your projects accurately and develop your user and customer strategy. Overall, they’ll help you think through the “how” to develop or customize a CRM system that can meet your expectations. A professional who has expertise and practical experience in helping a variety of different business types transition to CRM is one who will make the difference in whether your customer relationships improve and your business grows.
What are your expectations for CRM? Give us a call today (269-445-3001) to discover how we would work with you to design the “how” of your implementation.
Helpful Related Resources
The Powerful Value of CRM simplification
Deeper customer insights lead to stronger decisions
Dramatically improve the Customer Experience with CRM
Data quality - Is your CRM Data the Elephant in the Room?
Topics: Customer Experience Improvement CRM user adoption Make your business work smarter Business analytics
