Has the “Friction Tax” Hurt Your Business?

What causes friction in your business operations?

We’re talking about the aggravations that slow down or block your workflow, causing you to stop to create a workaround, search for information that got lost in the shuffle, or solve a misunderstanding caused by lack of it.

These aggravations in a working environment frustrate employees, drain energy, and chip away at productivity. They become a “friction tax” because they siphon off a business’s bottom line.  Are people getting tired of having to work uphill all the time?

An effective CRM should smooth out operations. Unfortunately, quite a few businesses who contact us say that their prior experiences with CRM added to friction rather than reducing it. They were not experiencing the return on their CRM investment they had hoped for, and they came to us with hopes we could lead them to a better way.

Is your CRM levying a friction tax on you?

Which of these challenges is bleeding your investment?

Your CRM mobile app leaves you hanging. It’s either nonexistent or disappointing. You, your sales reps, and your service support staff in the field can’t look up information wherever, whenever it’s needed. And it doesn’t sync well, so there is a lag in the accuracy of the information available to others.

Field sales staff get so frustrated with the app that they are not entering helpful follow-up status notes into the selling opportunity, leaving the sales team without vital information that they must track down, wasting time and energy.

Your email and CRM don’t synchronize. Bouncing back and forth between your CRM and your email wastes precious time and can lead to inaccuracies. Contact information in the CRM needs to synchronize both ways to and from the email system.

So many clicks and queries! Looking up data in the CRM system takes too long. It requires multiple clicks and inquiries to find the chronological history of communications (timeline) with a contact or company account.

Creatio Account Timeline

Where is that info you need? Key performance indicators and analytical dashboards are either nonexistent or difficult to customize for your specific business needs. You end up delaying Important decisions or making them without the quality and quantity of knowledge you need.

Sales, marketing, and service follow-up contacts are getting dropped. Crucial responses are delayed because employees aren’t getting key alerts on time and in the right order.

You don’t have an IT team or it’s too slammed to provide maintenance or make changes. Business rules on required fields for data entry are too difficult to set up and maintain without help. Common logic that would reduce data entry and lookups is not set as a default. You are missing the agility to make CRM work the way you need it to function.

Just trying to stay in sync and up to date daily is a struggle and leaves little time for learning better CRM practices. Without in-house CRM expertise or an expert CRM business partner, you won’t get valuable, timely insights that will facilitate your CRM’s additional capabilities.

You need training and answers to CRM questions – where are they? Educational resources about how to more effectively use and apply your CRM are extremely limited. Videos, PDFs, use case studies, best practices all would be helpful to reduce friction – if only you had them at your fingertips.

CRM updates throw everything off. Each time a CRM update comes out, you either miss getting it applied automatically or something breaks when the CRM software vendor updates your system behind the scenes.

Or you’re only getting yearly updates when CRM technology is constantly changing. And so the friction continues when it wouldn’t have to.

Your business processes could use improvement. It’s hard to automate and manage your processes because your CRM does not have business process management, or that function is archaic.

What a Friction Tax Break Can Do for You

How might a friction tax break benefit you? You would gain:

• Flexibility. You would get more things done more effectively.
• Ability. Imagine how you could personalize opportunity messages, smooth out internal operations, rate prospects, and delight customers with your service interactions.
• Profitability. More deals could come from your best-fit customers. Customers delighted with support services will stick around and become fans.
• Predictability. Patterns will surface faster so you can more easily connect the dots to improve strategy and tactic.
• Positivity. More engaged, happier employees are more focused on enhancing the customer’s experiences.
• Fluidity. Wouldn’t you like more agile, smooth workflows?
• Happier people. More engaged employees and customers.

The Good News

Your business can reduce friction that is dragging down momentum and performance. Creatio doesn’t just talk a good CRM game. It’s a unified CRM that aligns sales, marketing, service, and more. It is built on a BPM engine, so you can automate processes and change them faster. And its low-code platform means anyone can be a developer – you get customization without heavy IT reliance. Short story: Creatio CRM gives businesses fluidity and agility instead of friction.  Yes, you can get all of your team focused on your customers and being fully engaged in their work!

Investigate how Creatio plus our knowledge and experience with both business and CRM can give you a friction tax break. Isn’t it about time? All you need to do is email Dick, give us a call (269) 445-3001, or schedule an appointment.