Posts Tagged ‘CRM’

CRM Best Practices…at a glance

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

CRM success isn’t only about technology; rather, it is a successful integration of three critical variables: People, Business Processes and Technology Solutions. Getting everyone in your organization to focus on your customers will drive the adoption of the CRM technology.

CRM, at its core, is an organizational commitment to change. CRM begins and ends with management commitment to introduce a customer-driven culture into a business. Managers leading CRM projects need to recognize that employees are sensitive to change, and need to be included in the transition process.

Managers need to make a convincing argument to employees of the benefits of being able to view all customer data in a single environment. People become attached to doing things a certain way, using the spreadsheets, contact managers, simple databases, and even the paper records they’ve always used. Even though they recognize that their methods may be inefficient, they are often reluctant to move data out of the software they’ve become accustomed to.

That’s why CRM tools need to be intuitive to learn and easy to use. Change is never easy, but easy-to-use CRM tools smooth the transition. If software tools are hard to use, most people give up trying after the first try. Make sure your CRM suite has good data import features so loading data into a new environment won’t undermine the transition to CRM before it gets off the ground.

Choose a flexible CRM solution that is easy to adapt to your business, and that will grow with your company. Lack of customization and personalization options leaves the business operator with few choices. Be sure to choose a CRM solution that is easy to upgrade with new features or other capacity enhancements.

Make sure your data is safe. Your customers are your business, so your CRM solution should provide you with reliable backup features. Hosted CRM solutions archive your critical data for you on their own servers, so your business is protected against any local service outage or hardware failure. CRM solutions need to be secure, as your customer data must be protected against theft or tampering. Verify security and backup features with your CRM vendor.

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3 Simple Steps for Selecting the Right CRM

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

If you are embarking on a CRM software selection process, it can be a daunting task.  With all of the products and partners to choose from, finding a jumping off point can be a struggle.  We’ve compiled a list of tips to guide you through your software selection process and suggestions for “must-have” features and functionality that will ensure that you choose a CRM system that will support your needs now and into the future.

1) Start With a Plan and Ensure You Have Buy-In

  • Gather background information on the benefits, savings, ROI and cost justification of selecting and implementing a CRM solution.  Present this information to your organizational leadership and make sure everyone in your organization is on board with the project to help ensure success. 
  • Determine who the stakeholders in the project are and work with them to establish a common, company-wide goal for the CRM system.  From these stakeholders, put together a project team that is headed by a true CRM evangelist.
  • Determine your budget, while keeping in mind the costs associated with the selection process as well as implementation, integration, training, and ongoing support.
  • Assess your business processes to determine what best practices you have in place and what areas could benefit from improvement through the new system.  Determine the pain points in your existing system, and map your current processes in all areas of the organization.  Then once you define your business requirements, you’re better prepared to select a software solution that meets your business needs.

2) Compare Your Options

  • Consider working with a partner that offers Software Selection Consulting Services to help you through the process.
  • Before you view a demo of any solution, make sure that the partner showing you the solution understands your requirements and is committed to showing you how their system will meet those requirements.  Don’t waste your time being swept away by impressive features that you will never use. 
  • Be sure that your hardware and operating system can support the systems you are considering.  You don’t want to waste time seeing products that aren’t feasible options for you.
  • If you are looking at several options, establish a scoring system that tracks the various benefits and shortcomings of each product.  The scoring needs to reflect not only the features of the products, but the qualitative aspects of the solution and working with the partner.
  • Your internal CRM project team should be present for all demos and meetings with the partner.  They should be encouraged to share their concerns and feedback, as well as ask questions.  Use the partners responsiveness to the team’s concerns and questions as a factor when you are deciding whether or not to work with them, as it will affect your business relationship long-term.
  • Make sure that you are being shown the current version of the software.  Don’t make a purchase based on promises for future technology.   

3) Find a Solution to Grow with Your Business

  • A true CRM solution will provide company-wide benefits  through marketing campaign management, sales force automation, customer care, contact management, task management, and scheduling.  Settling for anything less in the short term will cause you to repeat the software selection process in the long-term and cost you more to implement or integrate disparate products. 
  • Make sure that the CRM solution you are considering integrates with your other business management applications.  It should be able to be deployed on different technologies as you needs change as well as support Web Service, have a strong API for integration and be able integrate with other technologies such as your phone system and website.
  • Your CRM system should support the ways you do business and be accessible from anywhere you do business, that means it should support all standard wireless devices as well as support interactive web chat with your customers and make a wide range of information available to them over robust web sites. 
  • As a technical solution, your CRM software needs to be properly matched to your technical requirements and capabilities.  Therefore, you should look for a CRM solution that provides the capability to seamlessly move from a hosted solution to an on-site systemand vice versa as your technical abilities change. 

By Socius, an Ohio Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner

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CRM Comparison – Evaluating the Best Resource for Your Company

Monday, May 31st, 2010

The term CRM is one that is becoming increasingly used in business organizations. It is also one of the essential aspects to consider in order to run a successful modern day business or organization. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. The formatting of programs and software that assist businesses in the development of customer relations management techniques and strategies is becoming, in and of itself, a major field. The following article will offer advice on how to conduct a CRM comparison. It will identify the basic components of the various CRM support products and programs currently available, in order to help organizations determine what their best strategy should be when choosing to implicate a CRM program.

When conducting a CRM software comparison, remember that the basic goal behind a customer relations management program is to provide your organization with the necessary tools and resources that will help to strengthen existing and future relationships with clients. Your CRM product comparison should evaluate which software will best satisfy your company’s needs, and most effectively help to built long-term working relationships with clients. Does your company focus on sales? Campaign management? Marketing? Or customer support? Each of these specific focuses may require a slightly different approach, and there exist CRM products to address each or all of those specific functions.

CRM software employs various methods and target specific functions of operation within businesses. Two general types of software to examine in CRM comparisons are those that are either analytical or operational. Analytical CRM software deals with issues such as unified billing, maintenance, planning, marketing, advertising, finance, and manufacturing. It has a sub-category that deals specifically with sales intelligence, analyzing customer patterns and trends, directly aimed at making sales. Operational CRM software deals with policies and processes, and focuses on solutions to companies’ direct contact and interactions with their customers. It addresses unified approaches to incoming and outgoing customer correspondence such as phone and email, and can provide customer service representatives with quick access to individual customer information and contact history.

Additional approaches to software that should be considered in a CRM comparison include approaches to employee training, the broadness of the given program, and whether it takes your company’s larger goals into consideration, and additional special features, such as voice tracking equipment to track customers’ sentiments while on support or sales calls.

One of the most popular CRM software providers is salesforce.com. For this reason, businesses conducting research into what type of system they will use would be well-advised to conduct a salesforce.com CRM comparison, along with other leading CRM software providers.

Some other popular top vendors that should be included in a CRM comparison include Oracle and SAP, as well as Microsoft Dynamics, Cherdiant, and Infor; and the website www.compare.com provides free reports of the various CRM softwares.

Customer relations management programs are becoming an invaluable tool for both customer service and analysis purposes. Conducting a CRM comparison before investing in CRM software will ensure that your business is using the software that best suits the needs of the administration, the employees, and most importantly, the customers.

 Originally published by Chris Neumann, www.chrissoftware.com.

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Where CRM Fails

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Between the decision to implement an enterprise-wide software solution and it implementation and acceptance, lies perhaps the most treacherous ground in the corporate IT landscape… 

Research group after research group report that an extraordinarily high percentage of software projects either fail to meet their goals after completion, are delivered over-budget or late, or are simply cancelled outright. 
 
Gartner (News – Alert) says half the projects in their study exceeded their initial budget tolerance by 200 percent. Standish Group suggests fully 1/3 of software projects are scotched before a single user has drawn benefit from the application.
 
CRM – Customer Relationship Management – projects are no different; they are subject to the same torques and tensions that tear other projects apart. In fact, the numbers are higher with CRM projects; studies show up to 70 percent of CRM projects fail. What is the source of so many CRM failures? Are there characteristics of CRM projects that make them especially vulnerable? More important, what are the remedies?
 
Defining Success
 
Ask anyone at your company what CRM is, and you’ll get your first clue about the source of the frequent project failures. Too many people, from staff-level to the corner office, from IT to sales, believe that CRM starts and ends with software.
 
In fact, the core of good CRM is the same as it’s been for decades: the right people executing the right processes, using the best possible tools at their disposal. And these days the ‘best tools’ means software that support the relationships between companies and clients.
 
To get your project off on the right foot, you’ll need to embrace a balanced view of the current situation that accounts for people, process and technology. That starts with some self-analysis covering all three components:
 
•Assess and Benchmark your current team. What does the organization look like? Who has a customer-facing role, and what do they do? A basic organizational map, along with a list of each team’s assigned roles is an essential first step. If you don’t know what you have to start with, it’s nearly impossible to map out next steps and improvement points.
 
•Map out the basic contours of the key customer-centric processes, including those that generate new business, as well as those that work to support existing clients. Who does what and in what order? What tools do they use to accomplish these tasks? Think about supporting processes as well, like prospect generation, lead qualification, or contract writing. The most important rule? Be honest about how it actually works, not how it’s supposed to work.
 
•Create a vision of the future by modeling the way your customer-centric processes ought to be. Now you can set your “AS-IS” information aside and start working through how things should be. For each existing process, you’ll want a corresponding future state.
 
•The difference between your IS and SHOULD processes represents your path for change.
 
While technology is an important piece of CRM, companies that focus solely on buying or building the best IT components will too often become another statistic in another research group’s report. Meanwhile, companies with healthy CRM implementations have inevitably taken into account all three of the primary components for success: people, process, and technology.
By TMCnet Special Guest
Steve Snapp & Swain Scheps

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