In last week’s post, we discussed the importance of establishing a customer-centric CRM strategy aligned with organizational goals before diving into a system solution. Continuing our “Considerations for CRM Success” blog series, today we’re taking a look at the next step in deploying a successful CRM implementation—ensuring the software is flexible enough to accommodate the way you work, with built-in tools that enable your employees to continue operating within the best practices and environments they’re used to—boosting user adoption and system ROI.
Below are a few considerations to help you sort through the options and maximize your CRM flexibility:
A Flexible CRM System Fits Your Existing Architecture and Works for You
A successful CRM integration is one that makes it easier for your teams to do their jobs, facilitating access to customer data and expanding communication and collaboration capabilities by bringing under one umbrella your existing customer-facing processes, from lead generation to maintenance and support. While process refinements may occur as users navigate new applications, overall, the goal is a more streamlined, effective approach to customer engagement that still maps to the unique features and functions of your business, refining and standardizing without completely overriding them, helping you maximize the value of your CRM system.
A Flexible CRM System Can be Modified as Your Organization Grows
Prioritizing software flexibility in your CRM solution can help ensure your organization remains adaptive and agile, even as your business needs shift and grow, so you can maintain your competitive advantage and stay responsive to internal demands and external factors. To this end, a solution built on a flexible architecture is not only cost-effective, but also strategic—ensuring your current practices are sustained while also allowing you to more accurately prepare and respond to evolving requirements.
A Flexible CRM System Streamlines Even the Most Complex Business Processes
At first glance, fitting highly intricate processes and customer relationship cycles into a CRM solution might appear challenging. Yet, such systems are in fact optimally positioned to benefit from this functionality, and while less flexible systems might be costly and time-consuming to integrate, a flexible CRM solution fits seamlessly into your existing environment with just a little fine-tuning, and can even help you simplify your existing practices to support new sales acquisitions and respond more quickly to customer service requests.
So in essence, after defining your strategy, it’s important to consider the level of flexibility your organization requires from a CRM architecture, and how to best leverage this adaptability to boost your current operations and amplify your customer relationships. At the end of the day, you’re busy—and the software you rely on to keep your teams running and customers happy should be more than capable to keeping up—bending and stretching with you, not breaking, as you grow.
Stay tuned next week for part 3 of “Considerations for CRM Success,” as we discuss how to define key business measures and metrics to help determine how a CRM implementation will affect your organization and guide more meaningful success analyses. In the meantime, to learn more about how our seasoned CRM consultants can deliver this functionality to your business, please contact any member of our consulting team at [email protected]. We also encourage you to contact Tokara’s VP of Business Development, Mark Fillingim, directly at +1 972-719-0213.
Source:
Aptean, “CRM: The Essential Guide: Five Principles for CRM Success,” http://www.aptean.com/assets/pdfs/resources/documents/APT_CRMP_GBWP_CRMTheEssentialGuide_US.pdf
NOTE FROM THE PRESIDENT
