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As part of My Customer’s ongoing series where IT leaders tackle the challenges most commonly reported by adopters of their category of tools, John Cheney, CEO of Workbooks, and Penny Lowe, head of service delivery at Workbooks, share their advice on how to overcome CRM stumbling blocks.
JC. Most organisations invest time and resources in internal communication – for the launch and for the first critical months following the launch – to enthuse, to clearly communicate goals and priorities and drive behaviour. Like many things in life, the difference between success and failure could be one person or a small group of people who realise the value of CRM. They understand the problems it’s addressing, dedicate time and energy to making it work for them and help drive adoption by their team and other colleagues.
Look for these champions and help them get quick wins. Then communicate the impact of these changes to the wider user group clearly explaining the business benefits/outcomes e.g. in terms of increased revenue, improved customer satisfaction, reduced operational cost (e.g. less re-keying of information as a result of doing more in CRM or integrating CRM with back office systems), Improved visibilty of metrics/KPIs.
Once others begin to see success, they are more likely to follow suit and start embracing the new tool.
The real key to success is to give your employees a reason to use CRM, not just because you tell them they have to. Look at it from their perspective: What’s the value of this application? How is it helping them get their job done more effectively? Put yourself in your users’ shoes, look at the WIFM? (what’s in it for me?)
JC. Data on its own isn’t much use. You need to decide what type of information you are looking for, then you can begin to analyse it more effectively, gain insights and make better decisions / take appropriate actions. For example:
JC. Firstly, make it easy to enter data by:
And secondly, only ask your salespeople to enter the data you need! Check the data your team is inputting is actually being used for reporting and whether it is useful. If not, consider taking this data collection field out. Only collect what will help you and your sales team get insight and make decisions.
PL. Did you know where you were heading before your started the project? A common issue is that CRM is implemented based on current working practice ie. Implementing what you already do without challenging the status quo. We would recommend running sessions with business stakeholders about business goals, priorities, understanding of the current state and desired future state. Is the business trying to achieve 10% year-on-year growth or 110%! Ideally these workshops would capture the current metrics e.g. revenue, operational cost, customer satisfaction, easy of reporting, etc. These are then your benchmarks for regular review.
Focus on metrics such as: increase in revenue; improvement in customer satisfaction; reduction in operational cost; and improved visibilty of metrics/KPIs.
PL. Does your CRM include the concept of ‘Compliance’ records? These records should be created when personal data is updated or impacted by a change – e.g. when an account is changed from a prospect to a customer, renewal of contract, etc. The record should include the legal grounds for processing, e.g. contractual obligation, Legitimate Interest etc and the expiry date of the record.
These values should be set based on your data processing analysis and privacy notice, e.g. you may have decided that for Contractual Obligation – your retention period is until two years after the account ceases to be a customer, whereas for legitimate interest you may have decided the retention period is until two years after their last interaction with you (e.g response to a marketing email, visit on your website, etc).
Dashboards that show you data which is about to expire – gives you the opportunity to either try to re-engage or to delete the record(s).
Does your CRM provide a data enrichment service which helps to maintain the accuracy of your account and contact data? Portals which enable data subjects to maintain their own data, raise Rights & Freedoms requests etc are also helpful in keeping your data up-to-date.
Find out more about Workbooks CRM or give our team a call on: 0118 3030 100