Existing legacy systems don’t support modern, web-services based integration that is required with CRM. Lack of adequate support from other vendors of existing systems that need to be integrated with CRM. Data integrity issues and uncertainty over ‘single source of truth’.
If your company is struggling with handling various business functions, or you’re simply looking to learn more about CRM, here are 9 business problems that CRM solves. One of the biggest challenges businesses can face dealing with messy, haphazardly organized data.
Vendor does not have enough experience with the CRM product being implemented. Vendor does not have technology or process maturity of delivering CRM projects of similar scale. Vendor not fully aware of the challenges in CRM implementation and is ill-prepared to anticipate and deal with them adequately.
Tracking If the activity isn’t in the CRM system, it never happened. Every company needs to treat its CRM as the only repository for tasks carried out by its team. If anyone has taken a step, it is revealed in the CRM and helps the higher management know what is being done.
Inflexibility to change existing way of doing things, giving up entrenched (bad) business practices and adopting best practices that CRM enables.
Mitigation – Adequate due diligence at vendor selection stage to assess vendor maturity and expertise.
CRM viewed as ‘something that benefits management only’. Mitigation – Making end-users aware of what benefits they get out of CRM. Incentivizing (both positive & negative) to use CRM system. Ensuring an intuitive, easy to use, fast CRM system. Planning adequate training exercises.
Changes in key personnel from CRM vendor’s side that roll-back the progress made on vendor’s understanding of organizational objectives
Vendor does not have technology or process maturity of delivering CRM projects of similar scale.
Your CRM can provide you with real-time reports based on your sales and marketing data . Many solutions also allow you to create custom reports with charts, graphs, and other visual aids. This is particularly helpful for users who have frequent meetings. With CRM, you can easily and quickly create professional-looking, meeting-ready reports based on up-to-date data.
One of the greatest ways CRM can help your business is by consolidating data gathered from various sources and using that data to predict your future sales. CRM can analyze past sales trends and habits, predict achievable sales revenue, and help your business plan for future growth. This is a vital feature for all businesses at the enterprise level.
Having a CRM solution means you can standardize the workflows of various tasks and assignments. When every employee knows how they should proceed with specific tasks and knows how to enter specific data into the system, it allows for less confusion and increased productivity.
Because CRM centralizes different processes and data, it’s a great way to encourage or improve communication between your marketing and sales teams. Without the marketing team, sales wouldn’t have anyone to follow up with. Without the sales team, marketing doesn’t have a clear goal. They’re strongly connected but are often completely separate from each other in a business setting. With CRM, communication and sharing information becomes easier.
This includes customer ticketing, built-in phone and messaging, conversational bots, customer journey management, and more. Many CRMs are developed with specific needs or industries in mind, so it’s easy to find solutions heavily focused on customer service.
They need a laptop and internet access. It’s also become increasingly popular for CRM vendors to offer mobile CRM solutions that take advantage of mobile features such as GPS and camera. This also means that employees can be productive with a single mobile device instead of bringing a laptop.
As a business, it’s important to be present on and aware of social media. If your organization has been struggling to find appropriate tools to monitor the social scene, look no further. CRM solutions come with a variety of features dedicated to social media management and marketing. You can schedule posts, access analytics, monitor your competitors, and much more. Depending on your individual needs, you can find a solution that focuses heavily on social capabilities instead of sales or customer service.