CRM Implementation

It is in fact more of a journey. It is a common misconception that often people mistakenly think that drastic results can be seen within a month after deploying a CRM. In this article, we want to guide you through the journey. 

The diagram below shows the CRM maturity process. Almost all companies start manual. And Excel spreadsheet, is arguably everyone’s first CRM tool. As your company expands, you need share loads of information across the organization. That’s when you start to automate part of your CRM process. For example: you may automate marketing aspect, while still uses spreadsheet to churn out reports.

Eventually, you will reach a stage or a certain size where you may start to lost track of customer activities. Losing track of customer like & dislikes, losing tracking of customer spending patterns, losing track of how many quotations you have sent to customer. You start to see the need to automate the end-to-end process using system, linking your campaign activities, sales pipeline and customer service into one. That’s when you start to have a phenomenal 360° view on every customer – knowing their history with associated campaign, opportunities, sales, leads, product and so on.

Does your journey end here? No. In fact, you are merely 50% on the journey. From here onwards, you optimize and realize the full potential of CRM. You can now data mine into these mountains of data to know your top customers by brand or by certain demographics, you can do cross-selling & up-selling to the right customer judging from their spending patterns, and at the end of the day, able to generate powerful management report for executive decisions. These are the real value of CRM – allowing you to spend more time with the right customer!

Many companies, who started a CRM initiative, did not end of reaching the ultimate goal of optimized stage.  So we like to share with you is 4 critical success factor when considering a CRM implementation.

Process: Every industry practices CRM differently. Although similar business cycle, the process are definitely unique in some way. Therefore, knowing the industry is critical when comes to defining the correct process flow.

Product: Getting the right tool is very important. In general, most CRM products in the market have similar functionalities, focusing on collaboration of marketing, sales and support activities. What you should seriously look into is perhaps its usability, popularity and how well it fits to your needs.

People: A key success factor in any project is to have the right people to implement it. The people include staff within your organization, vendor or partners. You need to have the right people to champion your CRM initiative, right people to define your processes and right people to automate it.

Price: Price defines the budget you are willing to spend on getting the right people and right tools. Cost is most often the gating factor when come to implement CRM. Hence it is absolutely important that you are able to justify the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) to your management.