CRM Best Practices

Ever wonder what you could be doing better?

By Bryan Becker, Senior Business Analyst

If you want your CRM solution to be really effective, you need to focus on important CRM best practices. In this article, we outline ten tips to help you get the most out of your CRM.

1. Clearly define the business problem, desired benefits, and metrics 

• Be clear about your pain points and goals. 

• Identify a key decision maker from the business who can clearly articulate the business problem your company needs to resolve.  

• Work with the key decision maker to identify the desired benefits.

• Clearly define performance metrics that can measure these desired benefits.

2. Find an executive sponsor and form a governance team 

• A CRM strategy needs to be adopted, promoted, and executed from the top down. 

• Choose an executive sponsor to the lead the charge.  

• Form a governance team made up of the executive sponsor, other executive stakeholders, and IT management.  

• When there is major project activity, it may be useful to include one of more representatives of the implementation team on the governance team on a temporary basis.  

• The governance team’s role is be to: 

  • Set priorities 

  • Insure adequate resources  

  • Remove roadblocks 

  • Monitor progress

3. Focus more on business processes than technology 

• One of the main reasons that CRMs exist to reinforce the business processes. 

• Create scenarios depicting how the business is run now and how it will operate once the solution is implemented. 

• Focus on making business processes more streamlined, efficient, and executable. 

• Make sure that your desired business processes are clearly outlined and well understood. 

• View CRM technology as a means to an end and not a panacea. 

4. Implement change management measures 

• A CRM system should have a fundamental impact on every aspect of a business - from customer facing activities to the back office. 

• If new business processes are part of the objectives, then getting employees to accept the necessary changes can be a challenge. 

• Leadership needs to drive acceptance of new business processes and workflows, and changes to organizational roles. 

• Leadership must be able to effectively communicate with management and staff, and get them excited about improving how they do their jobs, reaching more customers, and making the company more successful. 

5. Successful CRM implementations are user-centric  

• For a CRM implementation user acceptance is the single most important success factor. 

• Effective CRM systems are built around organizational roles. User interfaces should be designed to provide effective support for each of those roles.  

• Make sure that users understand the terminology, the business processes, and how the CRM supports the business processes. 

• Continuously solicit user feedback – this allows leaders to recognize user misunderstanding, user interface problems, and business process issues 

• Give visibility to your responses to user feedback – demonstrate that you are utilizing their feedback to make the system better. 

6. Integration between your CRM and ERP is a key success factor  

• Effective CRM-ERP integration can create a true 360-degree view of the customer. 

• Focus on maintaining be data integrity between both systems. 

• Data silos can cause innumerable problems so key data, such as revenue and credit limits, should correspond between the CRM system and the ERP system. 

• Discrepancies between the systems can undermine user confidence and acceptance.     

7. Data quality is a key determinant of CRM effectiveness 

• Poor data quality not only diminishes the effectiveness of a CRM implementation, it can also severely undermine user’s confidence in the system and raise frustration levels. 

• There should be careful consideration of what data is essential, and conversely, how data quality might be diminished by certain practices. 

• Careful consideration needs to be given to the trade-off between “required fields” and a “streamlined workflow”. 

• The content of bulk uploads needs to be evaluated before they are added to the system – Does the content satisfy its intended use? Is there the possibility that it might dilute the effectiveness of the existing data by “raising the noise level”? 

• Conduct assessments of the data that has been captured on a regular basis. When you look at the results there is a possibility that the results of the initial examination will raise further questions. When this happens drill down and ask more questions. 

8. Automate CRM processes to the greatest extent possible 

• Automation is often the weakest part of the CRM implementation, while it can be crucial to realizing productivity gains. 

• You want your sales and service reps focused on engaging customers, not remembering where to track down certain data or what to do next with each customer — the system can and should do that for them. 

• The more the workflow can be automated and guide users to the next best action for each customer, the more users will not just adopt but love the CRM system. 

9. Always keep the big picture in mind 

• Have a clear picture and understanding of what you need the CRM solution to ultimately achieve.  

• Once you understand the big picture, you can then break the project down into small tactical plans. 

• Make sure to identify all of the points which the solution will integrate with in your other enterprise systems, as well as interfaces with suppliers and partners. 

10. Continuous improvement is the path to optimization 

• Iterative, incremental, improvements are an efficient way to respond to change, boost user productivity, and user acceptance. 

• Addressing system inadequacies or unforeseen problems on a regular basis improves user attitudes and increases their confidence in the CRM. 

• A program of agile improvement allows the system to evolve to address changing business conditions.