When and Why you should Customize CRM
Built-in tools can make it easy to customize CRM, but it still takes effort to translate your business knowledge into fine-tuned Customer Relationship Management screens, workflows and analytics. Take a bit of time to understand what you are trying to do before jumping into customization. The effort you spend up front will pay off in the long run.
If your customer relations are running well, and you just want to keep the data in a state-of-the-art CRM, then you may be able to minimize or eliminate the time and cost of customizing your new CRM database and workflows. On the other hand, if you reason for buying a new CRM is to make the company run better, then you should take a close look at improving your business processes.
Your staff knowledge can be recorded by the ordinary, daily use of a CRM system. This captures relationships and historical transactions, which are an incredibly valuable business asset. Your future transactions and marketing efforts will be much more valuable if you invest consistent thought, discussion, evaluation, and time to mock up workflows and customize your data capture.
Done well, customization saves time and money in the long run because you replace archaic methods (“we have always done things that way”) with new procedures (“this is how we can provide better service and beat the competition”) Putting things in a positive light removes uncomfortable discussions about losing data and relationship knowledge because of disorganization and ‘data silos.’ People may not recognize that they become frustrated because things are not flowing as well as they could, data is not retrieved as easily as it should be, and the conventional wisdom may blame the wrong things.
All this can be alleviated with good discussion, thought, identifying daily short term goals of each key player in the company, and how the CRM system can be modeled to what they need, not their workflow modeling to what they have.
The effort can make a huge impact on the labor intensive tasks of their business as well as provide valuable data easily for big business decisions. Quick access to data, custom reports and simple workflows will free your company from a lot of the daily grind and friction, which makes everybody happier and more productive. All of this is the output a good customization and workflow study.
“Done correctly” means investing the time to discuss the current daily tasks and workflows to identify places where these tasks can be automated by the correct customization of data and forms, put together in intuitive workflow steps. More time, discussion and proof of concepts spent here translates into highly valuable production long term.
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