Customer Relationship Management (CRM) will provide a 360-degree view of your customer, especially when integrated to back-end systems such as your ERP, sales, or e-commerce systems. Read on for these CRM Best Practices.
By implementing the 5 Best Practices of Extending CRM and other CRM best practices, your company gains a strategic capability that can be shared across your organization, and will drive an improved customer workflow behavior. However, you might be surprised at how many implementations forget one or more of these best practices.
1. The CRM systems of today have robust functionality, API’s, and are highly flexible allowing you to deploy and integrate a solution that will work the way your company does. For example, by integrating your CRM into Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, it creates a comfortable, user-friendly tool to help simplify sales activities and improve adoption. This has the added benefit of providing your sales management some tools and analytics that can help drive effective sales management, along with accurate forecasting.
2. Sales reps, employees, and customers increasingly use mobile devices. CRM provides rich functionality to smartphone and tablets, giving your mobile workforce a strong viable advantage when you know how to leverage the technology and features. Using a full-featured mobile app provides business critical on-the-go data and all the functionality needed to improve the sales cycle and productivity for your staff and business, another CRM Best Practice.
3. Dashboards and Business Intelligence (BI) are now also playing a major role in the best practice of CRM solutions. When implemented, they can provide you a data visualization tool that displays your current metrics and key performance indicators. They consolidate and arrange the numbers, metrics, and scorecards on a single screen that pulls in real-time data from multiple resources and graphically displays rich visuals so you can analyze more closely your marketing effectiveness and sales conversion rates.
4. The CRM of today can be designed to help your business by driving more opportunities with marketing automation for many of those mundane tasks associated with data entry and tracking of leads. This will help decrease any chances of error that have a habit of finding their way into your system and it will free up your staff from wasting valuable time on tedious tasks. More importantly, integrating marketing automation with your CRM can provide a powerful combination for nurturing leads into sales opportunities without the need for unnecessary human intervention.
5. In addition, companies are turning to the service tracking modules in CRM to help manage post-sale issues. Acquiring customers is very hard, but keeping customers is critical. A strong customer service discipline will make sure you can know the health of your relationship with any customer when it comes to post-sales and service issues. A robust service module will also allow you to track trends, analyze behaviors, and look for ways to better serve your overall customer base.
The CRM Team at XTIVIA can help you design the ultimate custom CRM-Sales-Marketing Automation system that will work specifically for your business needs.