How To Make The Most Out Of Your CRM

Have you invested in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system but you are not satisfied with the results? You are not alone. The major reason for this dissatisfaction is that many businesses do not know how to use CRM. There are several tips that will help you make the most out of your CRM.

Consider hiring an administrator to run your CRM. This administrator needs not be an IT person. You should have a good attitude towards the CRM as you should give it time to work for your business. Give the employees who are using the CRM the training and support they need, and insist that they use it so that it becomes part of your business’s culture.

Just like you do when developing a product, your focus should always be on the customer when implementing your CRM. You should always ask questions like: “How is the CRM benefiting my customers?” “How can the data collected help customers?” “What helpful events can this data trigger for customers?”

You should focus on reports. Good CRMs like Salesforce.com have several reports that give you such data as new opportunities, lost sales, recent activities, and open quotes. These reports are important because they will help you make informed decisions. You can choose to have Salesforce.com reports delivered automatically to your email. You should also use Salesforce test data to get information such as what your customers like and the quality of your product/service.

Avoid the common mistake of failure to recognize, celebrate, and reward success. If you reward those that excel in using your CRM, you will create healthy competition and this will make a big difference. You should share scorecards and give feedback to all users every week.

Good CRMs have many features and you should avoid the common temptation of using all of them because this will increase the learning curve exponentially. Use proven features such as Salesforce data migrator, Chatter, a real-time sales collaborative tool, Work.com, a social performance management platform, and Salesforce data loader for the best results.

The employees who use CRM are human beings and you should, therefore, treat them as well as you treat your customers. These employees are the face of your company and if they are dissatisfied, they could cause existing and potential customers to walk away by their action or inaction.

Gather contact information as this will help you contact your customers on a more personal level, increasing conversion rates. Salesforce.com allows for saving of such data in filterable and searchable fields and you can use this data for mail and marketing campaigns.

You should be consistent. If you have a CRM today and you do not have one tomorrow, this could create distrust. For customer loyalty and retention, customers need you to know where they will find you and the quality of your offering.

Most top CRMs such as Salesforce.com have customer portals that allow customers to track their cases. Take advantage of the huge social media community by including social networking plug-ins.

Jenny is freelance content writer. She has written many good and informative articles on technology, software, web hosting, internet, etc. From this article, she has given some information on Salesforce. To know more, visit this site http://www.flosum.com/salesforce-ant-migration-tool/

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