CRM Best Practices- How to get the most ROI from your CRM

“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” -Damon Richards

CRM software is now the biggest software market in the world and the growth isn’t slowing down. In fact, CRM is now expected to reach more than $80 billion in revenues by 2025. No wonder, CRM has been proving its mettle all around the globe, for almost all industry segments. After all, the customer is the epicentre of any successful business. And when it comes to custom CRM development, there is nothing like it – your own business needs, your own way. But it isn’t that easy as it sounds. Not all CRM solutions are able to crack the code. You need to have a stringent focus on certain CRM best practices, while implementing it. To extract the finest out of the CRM solution, it is vital to follow these CRM strategies to the core.

These CRM practices help you answer the following burning questions that always arise prior to implementing a CRM solution:

• Which CRM suite is right for my organization?
• How do end users easily adapt to the CRM solution?
• How will the CRM solution help augment productivity and profitability?
• Why should you opt for custom CRM solution?
• How can we make our organization relationship oriented?

“Happy Customers will do anything to continue the relationship.” – Marley Majcher

Top 10 CRM Guidelines That Can Extract the Best from Your CRM Software

Look for a CRM Solution and CRM Solution Partner, Who Understand Your Needs

It is essential to choose a CRM solution as well as your IT partner, who is going to support the implementation, wisely so that you get what you want. There are umpteen CRM solutions and IT partners in the market, but what is best for you is something that you really look for. Hence, it is important that you are very clear about what are your needs and expectations and based on that, choose the software as well as the solution provider.

Set Up Your CRM Plan Well in Advance

Organizations who have a good vision set up a CRM plan much in advance to assess the strategic competencies that they have. This helps them face the hurdles that come in the way and, adjust well to the changes that are inevitable with the inset of the CRM solution. The CRM plan must be prepared and analysed in such a way that it offers a subtle balance between technology, people, processes and knowledge. Creating a CRM environment based on these parameters works best as it leaves no area untouched and prepares the CRM solution to be an integral part of each stakeholder involved.

Give more focus to personalization and customization

Organizations need to understand the customer well in depth, prior to CRM implementation. After all, it is the customer for whom we are implementing these IT solutions. If the customer is happy, that is going to reflect directly on the business performance. To understand the customer better and offer what is required, it is necessary to personalize and customize organizational needs in such a way that it is at par with what is needed. Novel ways and means can be worked out to understand customer patterns, behaviour, futuristic needs, loyalty, feedback and more. With mobility as the key, it is now possible to implement these CRM techniques with ease.

Offer intensive, rich and quality content to customers

Organizations have a tendency of stuffing websites and portals with unnecessary content and that is where the customers tend to get suffocated and lose interest. Content should be interesting, relevant, secure, to-the-point and should be able to keep the customers engaged and curious for more. It should have a needed adherence to the Google standards, SEO standards and customer needs. Hence prior to CRM implementation, there should be a thorough check on the content on relevant medium of communication.

Understand, analyse and mine your data well

The main objective of any good CRM solution to capture and arrange huge chunks of data. The point lies in turning this data into actionable items. CRM policies should be built around data management techniques that handle the data with security and care. These best practices would then handle your data in such a way that there is a productive and profitable output that can help stakeholders in taking appropriate business decisions.

Keep your CRM policies simple & straight

All that glitters are not gold. You may come across so many complex processes that may attract but for a start, it is always better to keep your CRM policies simple, straight and understandable. Once the CRM approaches that you have adopted work well, you can always pitch in more complex ones, one after the other and observe its implications. CRM solutions have a lot of functionalities to offer but would they suit your needs? Are they meant for your organizations? Will they help you achieve your goal? All these questions are a must, prior to starting off.

Go in for a phase wise implementation schedule

When it comes to implementing a totally new solution, that tests your time, cost and energy quotient, it is advisable to go in for a phased roll out. Any CRM solution could have many modules that are interlinked to each other and may also talk to other third-party systems. Having all of them together for implementation could cause trouble. Best is to chalk out a proper implementation plan and work step by step.

Chalk out a proper training and support plan

One of the customer relationship management best practice talks about chalking out a detailed plan for training and support. What result would you get if you have a premium CRM solution in place but without a proper training schedule for its end users! Training and support is a very important aspect of the entire implementation schedule that sometimes, get least importance by organizations.

Survey across all user segments and see how they work

User segments may vary organization wise. Usually, there is a tendency to have detailed interactions with the upper layer of users, not going into depth. The ideal way of getting the right inputs is to spread user base horizontally and vertically, to cover up almost all types of user and understand how they work and what do they expect, from the CRM solution.

Remove pain areas in advance

No project exists without its set of pain points and challenges. If identified well in advance and handled appropriately, these pain areas could cause less trouble while implementing the CRM solution. There could be areas that are troublesome for customers. It is better to address those areas before implementing the solution.

 “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” – Steve Jobs

Customizable CRM Solution is here to stay. With the above-mentioned CRM principles, it is ascertained that custom CRM software is a better option for organisations who are looking at implementing a CRM solution that matches up to each of their business requirement. As technology progresses, there are innovative advancements like cloud computing, IoT, AI etc. that will integrate with the CRM solution to make it a better offering to its end users. Surely, an interesting area to watch.