The Key To A Successful CRM Implementation

When fully adopted, a CRM system can be the linchpin to your business growth. By housing your customer data in a single source of truth, there will be clear visibility of customer interaction across the organisation. You can understand your customers and learn how to attract new ones by studying the patterns and understanding what your customers want. When implemented well, a CRM system can encourage collaboration and communication across your teams as different departments access and edit the data. 

It all sounds great, doesn’t it? Great yes, simple no. Realising the dream of a fully functioning CRM system and ensuring CRM best practice takes time, patience and potentially a company culture shift. Destination CRM clarify this: “CRM is not a straightforward tool you can simply onboard your teams onto or add to your existing tech stack.” Here are our tips for making your CRM implementation a success: 

Company Culture: Does your organisation have a customer centric culture? This means putting customers at the heart of the business and continuously striving to innovate and deliver customer focused solutions. Your teams should have a strong appetite for understanding your customers and be fascinated by customer analytics which piece the puzzle together to create a full picture of your customer. Why is this important? There is no point implementing a CRM system if your company culture does not encourage that hunger to continuously improve to impress your customers.    

Scoping Your Requirements: Before you choose your CRM platform, you need to understand what your company needs it to deliver. Your annual strategy sets out what matters to the business and its customers, so make sure the CRM will deliver against these objectives.  

Choosing The Right CRM: There’s no shortage of options, How can you choose the right system to support your business growth? If you have aspirations to significantly grow your customer base, the new CRM will need the data capacity to allow for records of all your customers. Be mindful of how you will cleanse the data to support GDPR requirements and make sure the system has a clear tool for this. Understand all the system’s utility, which you will use and which you won’t. Can you integrate other applications, such as Eventbrite & social media apps to manage event attendance? 

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Relationship with Implementation Partner: Once you have chosen the platform, make sure you establish ways of working with your chosen implementation partner. Often the pressures on the partner to deliver a complex CRM system and the pressures on the company to deliver BAU can lead to a breakdown in communication. It is important to establish the right level of governance for the implementation project from the outset and for expectations to be managed. You could consider appointing an independent party to manage the project and be the organisation’s advocate when liaising with the Implementation Partner.  

Embedding CRM Into The Organisation: So the CRM system is up and running. How do you make sure that it is fully adopted by the organisation? How do you ensure it continually evolves and supports the business on its journey? This is something to consider right from the outset and make sure you are using best practice change management. Presenting a finished product to your team and instructing them to use it will not encourage healthy adoption levels. Our free Little Book of Change Management will help.  

GDPR and data health: Bad data is frustrating for everybody and can lead to poor customer service. Make sure that you have processes in place to keep the data healthy and up to date, through a regular data cleanse which complies with GDPR.   

These are just some of the important factors to bear in mind when implementing a CRM system. We would be happy to advise on any stage of your CRM journey – be it technology assessment or project managing the implementation or dealing with issues of adoption. We have years of experience and have successfully helped many clients to embed their CRM systems.

Contact EstherM@NineFeetTall.com for more information.  

 

Source: https://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Web-Exclusives/Viewpoints/4-Keys-for-a-Successful-CRM-Implementation-145247.aspx  

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