Your purpose-built CRM needs to reflect your business goals. At its best, it can deliver incredible results, providing improved sales and marketing, actionable insights and can enhance your organisations communications. At its worst, a CRM can be a huge
burden, forcing your organisation to work around your CRM, rather than the other way around. We’ve outlined some warning signs that your CRM is not performing the way it should be.
Is your reporting up to scratch?
Your CRM should be able to easily measure key metrics and be able to provide valuable insights. A CRM that is capable of visualising metrics for presenting is key to helping making big decisions and a good sign the system is working for you.
We’ve tried to list some common measurements that can measure your performance by department, they include, but are not limited to:
Sales
- Number of prospects
- Number of new customers
- Close rate
- New revenue
- Number of retained customers
Marketing
- Number of campaigns
- Email list growth
- Web views
- Time per website visit
Support
- Cases handled
- Time to resolve
- Call handling time
- Cost per interaction
- Percentage compliance with SLAs
Does your CRM fit your processes?
A CRM should be able to fit around your business, not the other way around. Your existing business processes that have been proven to work need to be configured for your CRM.
These processes should be reducing administrative costs, preventing mistakes and improving internal and external communications.
If you are unable to create a workflow that matches the needs of your organisation, we would suggest speaking with a credited partner who can support you. They will be able to map out a timeline of the process from start to finish. Such processes could
include checking for duplicates, creating email alerts and necessary calculations.
You have alternative systems to alleviate your CRMs drawbacks
Are you using multiple systems to create a view of a customer? CRMs are designed be to be a single point of access, having all these systems that are unconnected creates mistakes, wastes time and becomes increasingly unreliable. Your source of data needs
to be definitive and the truth should not fit between many stalls.You should be able to create a single view of a customer or report quickly without surfacing other systems.
Do you have a slow, unresponsive interface?
Is your CRM cumbersome to navigate?
Are you finding it difficult to get to the view that you need?
Your sales team needs to be able to surface information instantly when dealing with a customer. Not having this capability is a red flag that the performance is not up to scratch.
We would consider reviewing your hardware as a much-needed upgrade could be the problem. In addition, a process could be clogging up the system or a bug is dragging the system down. If this appears to be the case, we would recommend speaking
with a partner to review your error logs to get your CRM moving again.
If your user interface is not structured and mapped out with the user in mind, and it’s easy to get lost this is a more serious problem. Your users need to be able to get from one view to the next quickly and information needs to be clear and de-cluttered
so that they can provide the correct data efficiently and quickly.
Hopefully your menus and layouts are customisable and aren't hard coded into the CRMs structure. If you can make changes, management can resolve this by putting a plan in place to optimise views and menus. We would advise hiring a partner
or UX specialist who understands information systems and how to deliver user interfaces that are effective for all your departments.
The quick retrieval of information by sales or customer service could transform your customers experience and improving their satisfaction.
