5 ways to get more value out of your CRM investment
New year, new you. It is said that of the people who sign up for a gym in January, 80% of them quit in 5 months. In general, only 1 in 5 of those with a membership attend - what a waste!
Like a gym membership, having a CRM is something which everyone seems to pay for - but few get their money's worth.
Let’s start with this truth – simply having a CRM doesn’t improve your business, anymore than having a gym membership loses you weight. They both enable and support the behaviours that you want to encourage.
If you haven’t configured your CRM to focus on that… it’s not going to help.
I’ve observed many businesses struggling with their CRM implementations as they don’t encourage the right behaviours of their users.
So what should your business be doing, to make sure that you’re reaping all the benefits that yours can provide?
Identify success measures
Often, businesses install a CRM saying ‘we want to increase sales and engagement’. But, they don’t think about what their success criteria are.
You need to define what success looks like.
Think about how you measure sales (usually easy) and engagement (usually not easy), and define what you'd consider a normal growth to look like over a defined period of time - that is your line in the sand. Then consider what a 5-10% uplift looks like - so you have a goal to aim for.
Establishing this line in the sand for your business, and then beginning to track and measure your data against this line, is one of the key steps to a successful CRM.
If you start tracking something, even if it’s manual, you’ll have a data point that can be used as a future point of comparison. For future reference: you should really do this before you even begin a CRM project, but better late than never!
Conduct a data audit
The next thing you need to be doing, is an audit of the current records in your system.
Get somebody to actually look at and analyse the data in your system.
Businesses often migrate data from old systems, along with their old processes, without thinking about how their data will work in their new CRM. For example, if you imported your customers’ last contact date, did you make sure the new field was a date field? Or did you store it as a text field because you didn't want to deal with the date formats on the old system, and it just seemed easier to import as text?
Yes, this actually happened.
Obviously this instantly rendered all that good date data semi-useless - since you could not perform date operations on them for analysis and workflows.
Take a good hard look at the records within your system. Are they clean/accurate? Are they relevant/useful? Are they compliant with data retention/privacy laws?
By establishing regular auditing and maintenance of your data, you’ll be able to promote a clean system environment, while identifying any holes in your existing data. This isn't just about being a data hygienist - bad data is one of the fastest ways to drop user adoption. When a user sees something being out of date, or duplicate, they lost faith in the integrity of the system.
If you've invested time in this, how do you stay on top of it? Most CRMs allow you to set up ‘exception’ style reports, which you can receive on a regular basis to help you spot where data isn’t up to par.
Improve data quality by collecting the right information, at the right time
CRMs are perfect tools for capturing information about your customers at specific points in their life cycle.
But, if you haven’t told the CRM that this data is important, it won’t automatically collect it. Ask yourself what you want from your customers and ensure that your CRM is collecting and taking advantage of this data. You don't need to ask all questions all the time - a modern CRM will allow you to ask questions conditionally - so your users only do the data entry if it is relevant.
For example, if you’re planning an SMS-based campaign in the future, have you already begun collecting mobile phone numbers? If not, why not? (Yes, I've seen some odd implementations.)
It’s simple stuff. Improve your records to make sure that your data is working for you, and improve your system to make it easier to do that.
Observe your users and look for patterns
Once you’ve started collecting the right data, you should evaluate user experience. Start by taking a good look at what your users are doing - and I mean, a real good look. Sit next to them, watch how they use their mouse and keyboard. Watch how their eyes move, how they find records, and how they do data entry. Listen to the comments they make, and don't be afraid to ask questions.
Particularly for an existing implementation, one that’s been around for a couple of years, you’ll find that people take the path of least resistance. They’ll find some things will be too slow, and they’ll make shortcuts - none of which might be in accordance with what you first designed.
You're going to learn a lot from this exercise - possibly too much. If you identify the three most common things each different role type does, and just focus on these, you're in a better position to deliver value to users quickly. It might be that some users need more support or training. It might be that fields need to be reordered on a page, or that some pages just need to be less clunky. In any case, quality time with users will point the way.
Or it might be that some of the business processes were great in theory, but not in practice.
Make a user community
If you’ve identified inefficiencies in your business practices, you now have the opportunity to ask yourself what underlying process problems created them.
For example, you discover a user is forced (mandatory field) to collect a piece of data at the wrong point in the process (e.g. when they might not have it). They are forced by the business process to do data entry in, even if they know it is wrong. Super simple to fix. If, you know about it.
The answer is collaboration.
Ensure that key users (possibly the ones who originally were your pilot users) from different parts of the business regularly get together to share their experiences. When you do this, people learn from one another.
When one user explains their own tips or tricks, it can often create an ‘aha’ moment for others. They’ll think ‘we could do something similar to that as well’. It creates further ownership of the solution by the users as well, and can improve engagement over time as well. In that environment, you'll hear their frustrations as well - like how annoying it is that you need to fill in a field when you don't know it. Bang, now you know what to work on.
Thanks for reading this article. It was inspired by a blog I published from a few years ago, slightly updated to be more relevant for current times (hello, GDPR).
If you liked it, you may appreciate some of my other posts:
- How to ensure your tech project doesn't lose its fizz
- Why picking IBM could get you fired
- Top tips for technology adoption (includes bonus picture of cute puppy)
Please feel free to use the comments box to say you love it, hate it, or have better ideas. Or if you just want to share your own experiences of a CRM fail, feel free to add too.