The importance of finding the right CRM solution

Finding the right CRM solution

A customer relationship management (CRM) system enhances, automates, and simplifies your business operations. While the significance of a CRM might sometimes seem secondary to that of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, it remains essential for your Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and Field Service teams to ensure your business runs efficiently. The right CRM solution not only supports your staff but also benefits your customers. Conversely, the wrong CRM solution can hinder your growth, increase employee turnover, and drive customers away.

How a CRM solution benefits your staff

Exceptional CRM solutions offer employees the latest customer and client information in real time, so they can easily view customer data and create personalized experiences in the following ways:

• Get up-to-date data and analytics that help your sales staff identify and prioritize opportunities.
• Gain insights into customers and their needs so staff can tailor marketing communications, offers, and services.
• Offer specific information about the products or services a customer has bought and suggest appropriate service-related solutions or remediation options to resolve any issues they are encountering.
• Centralize customer information, which reduces search and follow-up time for your employees.
• Combine all customer related information into a central solution which in turn provides users with a 360-degree view of their customers, habits and needs.

How a CRM solution benefits your customers

The right CRM solution also benefits your clients and customers. You can arm them with the tools to help them interact with you, communicate with them on their preferred terms and channels, while strengthening your relationships and loyalty. These benefits include:

• Allowing customers the ability to communicate through any channel and on any device.
• Giving customers access to more data so they feel informed and empowered in purchasing decisions.
• Offering customers the tools to schedule services that accommodates their preferences and availability.

The right fit, what a CRM solution should include

Starting with the basics. Here are the key features the right CRM solution should offer, depending on your needs:

Marketing

Execute multi-channel campaigns and improve marketing ROI. CRM marketing capabilities also:

• Determine the types of customer messages you need to send and the right time to send them.
• Seamlessly integrate with sales and analytics to find, nurture, and convert leads.
• Help create and send messages using your customer’s preferred channel.

Sales

Give your sales staff an overview of your customers; while helping you identify new business opportunities. The right CRM solution should offer options that help you:

• Share sales performance and key metrics with your colleagues.
• Identify and engage with the right buyers to grow sales relationships.
• Leverage processes to help you know what steps you should take during every step of the sales journey.
• Keep you organized by prioritizing leads, opportunities and sales related activities.

Customer service

Address customer issues quickly and effectively, so they’ll want to do business with you again and again. The right CRM solution will let you:

• Engage with customers on their preferred channel or device.
• Give you the information you need to quickly resolve a customers issue.
• Enable customers to use self service Bots and Portals.
• Use data and intelligence to learn how to provide better service and reduce costs.
• Offer a 360-degree view of your customer to help your agents deliver personalized service.

Field service

Offer connected and proactive services that help your technicians deliver positive onsite experiences for customers. The right CRM solution will provide tools that:

• Help your technicians improve service, reduce resolution times, and earn customer trust.
• Automate work so that the skill set of the technician matches the skills of the service request.
• Provide an effective scheduling mechanism to enable coordinators to optimize technician schedules and routes.
• Offer customers an easy-to-use self-service portal to track technicians or get self service recommendations.

What a CRM solution should offer

It’s important to choose a CRM system that’s adaptable. Not only should it work with your legacy systems and processes (if required), the right CRM solution should also be:

Extensible

Your CRM system should support different types of deployments, whether they’re cloud based or on premise.

AI & Machine Learning

Your CRM solution should harness AI and ML features to boost your teams performance, reduce administrative activities and wow customers. ?

Secure

Look for a system that customizes security levels for users and works with their security role.

Scalable

Get a CRM system that can keep up with you when you grow into other markets, while it streamlines everyday processes.

Three steps to finding the right CRM solution

It can be overwhelming to try to figure out what to prioritize when it comes to your CRM needs. After many years of implementing CRM’s, I would say this typically comes down to what features will provide the biggest impact to your customers and what features will give your end users maximum adoption. Start here by asking the following what, how, and when questions:

1. What works?

Make a list of the customer management systems you have experience with. Even if it’s only a basic sales, marketing, and customer experience process, that’s a start. Now make a list of the features you’d like to have. It’s important to choose applications that will work with what you’ll continue to use.

2. How much do we have to spend?

Now that you have your current CRM wish list, create a budget. How much do you want to spend? Do you want to do a complete system implementation, overhaul, add a few features, or invest in a combination of both? Don’t forget, costs will include recurring licensing and one-time professional services to configure the system.

3. What do our end users want?

Get your staff onboard. If they’re not, or you’ve kept them out of the decision-making process up until this point, it’s time to involve them. After all, they’ll be the ones using this system.

CRM in the cloud: the pros and cons

Many companies fear that a move to the cloud will be expensive and compromise security. The fact is that there are more pros than cons when it comes to moving your CRM processes into the cloud.

The cons can include:

• Unexpected costs that come up as your business grows.
• Relying on a hosting provider for any updates or repairs and the timing of updates.
• Complications that arise trying to move data to the cloud when working with disparate systems.

The pros include:

• Not having to purchase pricey hardware at the start.
• Updates and repairs are done by the hosting provider.
• Decreasing your IT department’s service and maintenance responsibilities.
• Having your infrastructure grow with you as your business expands into other markets.
• Offsite storage of company and client data that makes it less vulnerable to on-site disasters.
• Giving your entire team the ability to quickly view, access, and share the same client and customer information in real time across different channels.

?Getting help finding the right CRM solution

If you need a trusted advisor to help you navigate your CRM journey, look no further. With over 20 years of experience in CRM systems and over 250 implementations, I would be happy to provide guidance and help you down the right path.

Written by Richard Dennis – Digital Business Transformation, D365 CRM & ERP Implementation Specialist.