Over 91% of companies with more than 10 employees opt for CRM. All organizations eventually want to automate their processes, thus easing and boosting their growth. And since customer management systems don’t stand still and offer more and more solutions for business automation (like AI-powered CRM), they can do nothing but side with that 91%.
However, how CRM will (or won’t) help your organization fully depends on how successfully you implement it. Time after time at Synebo, we face the challenge of our clients not understanding how to choose a CRM system, why they need it, or how to present new software to their team. And that affects the results they expected to get from CRM implementation. So, today we’ll sort things out and give a few tips on implementing a new system easily and hassle-free.
Why do companies need to implement CRM?
Let’s start with the basics. We don’t know if you already have the answer to this question, but getting the idea of what CRM implementation actually means wouldn’t hurt. So, here are the three main reasons why.
CRM enhances time and cost saving
Workflow automation, as the possibility to skip boring, repetitive tasks, makes your team much more productive. When your CRM automatically performs scheduling, emailing, and data processing, your employees can concentrate on more valuable and difficult challenges. Thus, if before implementing CRM you needed 5 employees to get a certain result, now their number can drop to 3 or even 2 employees for the same result.
It betters customer experience management
CRM can collect and store every piece of information about your customers: their names, their interactions with your website or social media, your interactions with them, and so on and so forth. This allows you to provide a more personalized customer experience, monitor customer journeys, see the effectiveness of your sales tactics, and create a marketing strategy based on your targeted audience. Moreover, CRMs that support artificial intelligence can also analyze all data and even give you suggestions on improving your client’s satisfaction.
CRMs provide complex analytics
Since CRM takes the information from basically any place it gets access to, you can have a comprehensive overview of your business, including how your team works. You can run reports for every single customer or worker, for all of them together, for finances…literally anything. CRM reporting covers all your analytics needs. And some CRM analytics tools, like churn predictions, can even help you improve decision-making by pointing at the mistake and giving a solution.
How to make the implementation of CRM easier? (and more effective)
Sure enough, the way you implement CRM into your business depends on a number of factors, like the type of business, the size of your team, and the type of CRM you choose. So, there is no actual instruction on CRM implementation, but rather a few things you need to pay attention to. We interviewed our PMO managers, who helped many of Synebo’s clients implement CRM system light and breezy. And here are four tips for you.
Decide on what you need from CRM
Before you start creating software for your organization, it’s crucial to understand what exactly you need from it. Without clarity in this question, you can develop an absolutely useless for your business CRM or have problems with its implementation into the team.
“Choosing a CRM system includes a lot of things. It’s better to start with planning and analyzing the current situation within the company: detect the challenges you need to address and the goals you want to achieve with CRM. You also need to evaluate the amount of data that will be stored in the system, the number of users, whether integrations with other services are needed, the budget you set, and think about how exactly you’re going to maintain it (technical support). Then, based on your needs, you can start collecting a list of potentially interesting solutions on the market,” – advises Synebo PMO manager Svetlana Smirenskaya.
Yana Pushkar, another PMO manager, also insists on the importance of understanding not only what your business needs from CRM but also what can ease your employees’ workload and their interaction with the system:
“First of all, it is necessary to understand that CRM users are usually not-technical people. Therefore, the main principle when building a CRM will be to make everything as simple as possible. The process of maintaining data in CRM should not take too much time. If users need to fill out a form or create a record, they must have a minimum number of fields. If there is an option to enable filling in the data automatically, do it. If the speed of response is very important for CRM users, then it will be useful to develop a mobile version of CRM on which push notifications will be configured. And in the desktop version, messages must be duplicated by emails. If there is an opportunity to automate the process so that the user only presses one button, that is a good idea. It would also be great to add Dashboards and Reports. By the way, according to statistics, reports in CRM help not only better predict sales results, but also increase the percentage of customer retention by 40+%.”
Start with MVP
Having everything in your CRM immediately after the first release is not such a good idea, and it may even complicate the process of implementing CRM and the results afterward. Just imagine spending hours teaching your staff how to use new software, just to change it completely after two months, because you realize that your team needs completely different features.
Svetlana Smirenskaya suggests starting with a minimum viable product (MVP):
“Clients often try to implement everything at once. But it’s better to start with an MVP version, prioritize business processes and implement new features in iterations, improving the CRM system with each version. The client must test the system and how it helps their team.”
Determine who is in charge of CRM implementation
“One of the most common customer problems is that there is no single person responsible and no consistency on the customer side”, – says Svetlana.
If you determine from the beginning who is in charge of CRM implementation and the exact steps they need to take, you won’t have any problems with the process. A plan and a responsible person are musts.
Present CRM to your team in advance
It sounds obvious, but not all companies pay due attention to this stage. A team should be ready for a CRM implementation and get all the needed information.
“In order for CRM to function successfully, all its users must understand not only how to use it but also the goals that are set for them. For example, the sales department must not only know how to generate leads but also understand that the functioning of other departments depends on the quantity and quality of the leads they have created. It’s also necessary to highlight the importance of the Knowledge Base a company needs to create from the CRM documentation”, – says Yana Pushkar.
Svetlana, in turn, fully agrees with her colleague:
“If a company’s presentation for the team reveals the benefits of using it not only for the company but also for employees, then the transition to CRM will be less stressful and perhaps even positive from the very beginning.”
Conclusion
As you can see, hassle-free CRM implementation is pretty much possible but requires a special attitude from the company and the team. We hope that our tips will help you on your way to business automation, or at least they will make the picture clearer. Thanks for getting to the bottom of this page, and good luck in your future endeavors. Bye!
Author bio
Alina works as a Content Manager at Synebo, and one of her greatest passions is writing. She blogs about marketing, time management, web development, and cutting-edge technologies. Aside from content creation, Alina is a huge music fan, coffee and cat lover. Thus she spends days drinking her Chemex while crafting something nice for you to read and nights singing along with her cat.
