Customer Relations ship Management packages like offer businesses the ability to easily organize a database of their clients and prospective clients. This allows for a 360 degree view of all of the interactions that companies have with their clients and prospects – e-mails, phone calls, appointments, everything. The problem is many businesses implement a CRM package without a clear vision of what they would like that package to do. When that happens, business often end up with a CRM package that is either too difficult to use, too difficult to get from, or simply does not track the information they need – so after all the time and money putting a CRM package in place, they are no better off then when they started, or perhaps worse off.
So before evaluating a CRM package, a company should determine four key points:
- What sort of IT infrastructure do they have in place now, and will they need to upgrade? For instance, if employees are running older versions of Outlook, they may not get the functionality they thought they would in a new package
- Determine their business processes. What do they want this package to do? Do they need to track sales leads, and if so, to what level of detail? Do they need to create support tickets for client problems? Do they need a knowledgeable base to store common solutions to client issues?
- Define who in the organization should have access to data, and what type of access they should have. Determine who needs remote access, and what sort of organization structure is needed for various departments.
- Determine what type of skill sets their staff has, and what type of training they will need
By defining all of these processes ahead of time, a business can properly evaluate what the best CRM solution is for their needs; this in turn will keep implementation and training costs down, and increase user adoptability.
By Intellitec Solutions,
