Posts Tagged ‘CRM system’
Does Your CRM System Drive or Facilitate Your Processes?
Thursday, February 11th, 2010Does Your CRM System Drive or Facilitate Your Processes?
An organization’s CRM system can either effectively support or hinder their business agility and capacity to respond to change which affects their overall corporate performance and customer satisfaction. Today’s CRM vendors deliver systems with differing degrees of configuration and customization capabilities.
“Customization” and “configuration” are not necessarily the same things. While most companies use them interchangeably to mean “tailoring to meet your needs,” one needs a tech team while the other usually does not. Configuration refers to changes that can be accomplished without the tech team, but customization normally requires technical programming skills which will cost you more money.
Instead of worrying about finding a CRM system that is close to what you need and having it configured and customized, consider a modular approach.
- - A modular CRM approach allows you to purchase only those parts you need and have them quickly and easily tailored to fit your specific requirements.
- - Modules will integrate with existing software, so implementation will be quick.
- - Even if you cannot afford all the pieces you want immediately, you can add them on in time without any loss of data or accessibility.
- - And by teaching your employees to use a single module, the training will be short and straightforward.
- - Your employees will also then feel comfortable in additional modules as they will work intuitively and employees will need very little additional training.
The real value in this approach is that the CRM system is not driving your processes. You are in control of your processes and your CRM system is facilitating them!
Happy New Year! Happy New CRM System!
Thursday, December 31st, 2009Happy New Year! Happy New CRM System!
What will give you a happy new year? One answer: MORE SALES.
What will give you more sales? A new CRM software system. Let’s look at three ways CRM can increase your sales in 2010.
Help your company help you. Create success. Create positive energy. Try something new for the new year!
Flexible CRM Solutions
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009Flexible 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.