by Last Updated on May 17, 2017 by Sohail Qaisar
Modern customer relationship software solutions are designed to leverage customer-centric strategies, increase customer sharing and improve sales and financial KPI’s at the company. However, sometimes the organization may observe low end-user adoption issues, or find that it is hacking its existing CRM software to customize it in a way it wasn’t designed for.
Most CRM systems can be easily customized according to your business needs and to match business requirements, but it is essential for you to know when it’s the right time to upgrade or trade-in your CRM solution.
We have collected six main signs that indicate that your company needs a CRM solution upgrade:
- Customer communications take place outside of the CRM
It is indisputable evidence that a CRM software upgrade is a necessity when the customer communications start taking place outside of the CRM system, and there is no longer a direct way to respond and influence your customer’s’ experience with your company. According to the Forrester Research “How to Risk-Proof Your Culture for CRM” 49% of “people issues” are caused by slow CRM end-user adoption. From this perspective, a widely adopted CRM system allows convenient and intuitive data update. If you find yourself convincing your sales team to update and refresh customer info, it means that they don’t see the value of keying in data. Innovative CRM solutions collect each and every bit of sales data from your email communications and phone calls, providing valuable information to the sales people.
- CRM software doesn’t provide useful and valuable analytics
The ability to analyze customer data and forecast ongoing sales is extremely important when employing CRM solution – analytics allow segmentation to customers, estimates profitability, and personalizes product or service offerings based on customer preferences, etc. Data collection and analytics processes provided by your CRM system should be smooth and valuable so that you can make business decisions based on that. If you can’t – your CRM is just an additional storage for your customer info.
- You don’t have access to your CRM from mobile devices
In the age of digital technologies, it’s a common practice to be able to access any contact or company data anywhere – innovative CRM solutions have robust, full-fledged mobile apps providing consistent user experience no matter what device is in use, so that the user can do business anywhere. For instance, bpm’online CRM solution allows you to access all necessary customer information from any mobile device, plan activities, and manage opportunities, just to name a few.
- You use Excel for marketing campaigns
There is nothing wrong with using Excel to plan and manage marketing campaigns – Excel is a nice tool to track and analyze information about customers, clients, contacts, prospects, marketing events, and so on. However, everyone faces difficulties with storing the history since multiple versions of the Excel file tend to lose important data. Moreover, users often change fields, which means you lose previous useful values needed for analytics and auditing purposes. From this perspective, CRM connects and relates different records together in a single flow, and notifies you about the activities so that you won’t miss an important event.
- Customer Relationship Management systems don’t integrate with other business software systems
No one knows better than you how many programs and applications you use to manage tasks! Integrating as many of commonly used tools with a CRM reduces tedious work and the number of errors when transferring data between systems. Innovative CRM solutions tie together disparate applications to provide an entire enterprise solution for a single communication environment.
- You’re having a hard time tracking centralized information
Many organizations lose vital customer data because it is centrally stored and managed. You certainly need a CRM upgrade if you have any issues with tracking customer data centrally. CRM solutions should provide centralized information, making it easily accessible to every member of the team.
