CRM/EMR/DATA MANAGEMENT

Potential Sales Tracking:
A good CRM will have a way to track the company’s opportunities and customers. A feature that can track potential sales, including dollar amounts, what products will be needed for the sale, when it will close, and status in the sales process, is a great feature. Other departments can also use this feature for planning, execution of the implementation, and the delivery. Every department wants to know what to expect and a pipeline display tells the story.

Easy to Use:
This is more of a company behavior than a CRM feature. I know this has happened to you. Your CRM prompts a task to contact Mr. Jones today, so you make the call only to find out that he called in yesterday and talked to the accounting department about his lost payments. You have no idea that he is upset with your company because when you went to read the notes (before making the call to him), there were no notes. The accounting department failed to document the customer conversation yesterday, and now you’re unprepared and he’s even more upset! The CRM doesn’t work by itself. Ensure the organization complies with documenting customer interactions – phone, in-person, and email. When it is easy to use, your team will use it.

Communications Tracking:
Today, most communication is via email. You may miss meaningful conversations if you use an outdated email or CRM platform that is not tightly integrated. Provided the client is set up in the CRM, a tightly integrated platform captures all emails to and from clients within their respective files. Your users will enjoy this feature, knowing they don’t have to go into the CRM and retype everything they said in the email. Make it simple to use.

Mobility:
Make it accessible from smartphones and tablets. Data that can’t be accessed is useless. You worked hard to track it, now make it available for salespeople, management, and delivery people. Please set up your field team for success with complete account information at their fingertips. Today’s customers expect it. Select a cloud-based CRM, and data will be available to your team anytime, anywhere, and on any device, thus making it accessible.

Security:
CRM has become the backbone of your business, so protect it with rigorous security measures. Protecting data from disgruntled employees (internally and externally) and cyber-attacks is crucial. Select a CRM that allows you to assign security rights and access. You want to minimize the theft of your valuable relationships.

Determine your specific goals for using a CRM. Here are the most common:
— Track Leads and Lead Activity
— Track Customer Base
— Track Opportunities and Closing Rates
— Offer Connectivity Between Teams
— Manage Relationships
— Generate Customized Reporting
— Organize Business Operations
— Reporting

Your company may have unique information that drives the business, so your CRM goals may be customized accordingly. Don’t ignore what drives your business and try to “fit” into a CRM. The CRM should be flexible enough to fit into your business. 

Many organizations are willing to invest in business productivity tools. Unfortunately, these applications often fail to integrate with other applications.

This causes agents a lot of headaches because they must learn and master numerous applications and are responsible for multiple passwords. All this extra activity extends talk times and impacts service levels. The more applications can send and receive information electronically on the backend, the nicer a contact center agent's job will be. Automating the data flow reduces data entry errors, makes the job more interesting, and makes agents feel more successful, making them stick around longer.

First and foremost, for success, it must be used by everyone in the entire organization. Yes, everyone from front line sales to top line management. If it is too complicated, people will avoid it. They will not use it if it takes too much time to input data, and takes them off their number one task of working with customers.

Secondly, to avoid CRM catastrophe, understand and set the expectations right from the start. CRM’s can track a ton of information; marketing wants to track leads, accounting wants to track orders, legal wants to track compliance, and salespeople want to track hot prospects. You may be tempted to have salespeople obtain all that information while speaking to the customer. Don’t do it– salespeople are not data entry people; they are relationship people who effectively move clients through the sales process. Your top sales performers will not spend time collecting and entering data.

To make your CRM implementation successful, boil it down to the top 3-6 pieces of information you need to understand whether a deal is genuine. Salespeople can handle fewer, more meaningful pieces of information and are willing to comply with less data entry. Yes, CRM’s can handle 100s of data points, but if no one is willing to use it or enter the data, all those empty fields don’t help anyone.

CRM’s come in all sizes and capabilities. The truth is, most of the features you probably won’t use. Narrow it down to the top three things you need to know. These three things typically identify genuine opportunities, but you decide what is best for your sales organization.

1. What problem is the customer trying to solve?
2. Why do they need to solve that issue urgently?
3. How will they measure the success of the solution?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a vital tool for organizations today. Companies seek greater efficiency as the sales world has become more global and complex.

Index cards can no longer track the numerous interactions with current and future customers. CRMs are tools designed to track customer interactions, both presale and post-sale. CRMs of the past were so simple: a virtual Rolodex. Today, vendors have added so many features that it’s become overwhelming to determine which CRM is the right tool for your company. CRM’s can track and create a multitude of business processes. They can track conversations, track orders, make forecasts, capture emails, and much more. CRM software has come a long way since its inception. So, you might be asking, “What should I track?”