Flexible CRM Solutions
Many CRM vendors focus on delivering support for standard business practices, hoping to cover a broad spectrum of functional requirements out-of-the-box. Unfortunately, having extensive, pre-built functionality can make adaptation to specific customer needs more difficult.
Flexibility, or adaptability, is a direct result of underlying architecture. A company that purchases a CRM system built on an architecture designed for configurability or customization may find that making all those adjustments costs significant time and money and must be repeated for every little change in process. As a consequence, they end up attempting to adapt their processes to the software. While this speeds up deployment and eases the financial burden, it jeopardizes their business performance.
Worse than that, user adoption is negatively impacted by forcing people to change existing business processes to meet software-mandated ones. If a company wants user compliance, it has to give those end-users an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that reflects the way the company wants processes to work and the ways in which their employees have been trained.
When an organization adapts its processes to the software, several disasters result:
– Users become frustrated and create their own work-arounds to get the information they need
– Processes are botched so productivity is decreased instead of increased.
– “Quick fixes” are implemented by employees by cobbling together a variety of databases into a complex system that is not understood by anyone and increases overall database administration efforts.
– The patchwork of processes and databases does not deliver the “advertised” advantages of the new system; nor does it deliver the single-screen-360-degree-view-of-the-customer.
This can result from a general business CRM package or an industry-specific CRM package. While an industry-specific package may not need as many customizations or configuration changes as a general business package, each company has its own processes and requirements that make it unique in its industry. When the company changes those to accommodate a software package, it loses its competitive advantage due to its uniqueness. Therefore, it is important that the software package fit the business and not the other way around.
Stand-alone and self-contained CRM solutions have fairly inflexible architectures. They also become cumbersome to integrate with current enterprise applications.
A CRM solution with flexible structuring is easy to integrate and improves compatibility with pre-existing systems. It is also easy to enhance or extend its functionality.
