Benefits of using CRM for your business

Benefits of using CRM for your business, how it can change the future of your business. Are you one of those organizations who have failed to benefit from the CRM? Is your feature-rich customer relationship management software not performing to your expectations? Do you have second thoughts about your CRM investment?

Wait…the problem might not be your CRM application but your own people.

As per a recent research by Forrester and CustomerThink, close to 50% of all CRM problems are due to people issues. Surprising isn’t it?

As per a survey carried over 600 people using the CRM, around 42% people faced problems such as:

•          Understanding the CRM completely
•          Aligning the CRM with day-to-day working.

Many CRM experts have expressed their opinion on this matter. Let’s see what most of them have stated-

Organizations fail to successfully implement CRM because –

•          Hesitant attitude (by the employees) towards CRM adoption
•          Improper guidance by the management towards proper CRM usage
•          Improper attention given to business process change (that occurs after CRM implementation).

Having stated these factors, it becomes crystal clear that mere CRM adoption is not the route to success. Organizations need to plan before and after CRM implementation to gain the best out of it. So the question arises how to go about it?

Understand the 4 fundamentals of CRM

A balanced and well-etched approach is what experts recommend for successful CRM implementation. And to achieve this, you have these 4 fundamentals to focus on –

•         Business Process
•         Business Strategy
•        Technology
•          Users

3 steps you can take for effective CRM implementation

• Lessen the cultural resistance: A CRM (no matter how useful) will not benefit your organization if your employees do not prefer using it. And to do this, you need to show the CRM in a positive light to your people. Starting with the benefits of the CRM is advisable. Let’s say you can show your employees how they can get all the crucial data in one unified platform anytime anywhere with cloud CRM software or perhaps how the CRM can remind them about their important client meetings and calls.

By associating the CRM features to their common problems, inevitably you will bring your employees several steps closer to the CRM.

• Give control to the users: Achieving 100% user adoption is most challenging. One of the ways to gain this is by letting the users customize the software. As one of the CRM architects state – When users find that they can change a few software features and enhancements, automatically they prefer it. They look at the CRM not as standard enterprise software but as a tailor-made application for their work.
• Set example yourself: Many organizations fail to convince their employees for CRM due to inadequate support from the management. It needs to be understood that work culture is influenced by the senior members of the organization. Employees look up to the top executives to shape up their work pattern. Needless to say, if they find their team leaders and managers using CRM habitually, they too will use this software. Proper buy-in from the management is what is needed.

Patricia is a full time CRM consultant at ConvergeHub and part-time blogger. She has earned herself quite a fame as a specialist and market expert in CRM software. In the last five year she has worked with various companies as CRM consultant to help them move their businesses to cloud. Her expertise lies in offering cloud CRM consultation, CRM customization and integration solutions to small enterprises. For last one she is engaged in building ConvergeHub, cloud-based CRM solution for SMBs, as a consultant.Follow her at Twitter: @convergehub