Are you implementing a CRM system? Take off the rose-colored glasses
It happens like this: you go to the gym, swing, exercise on a treadmill, ride your 15 km a day. And suddenly you lose consciousness and rushed: cerebrovascular accidents, anemia, and a few more diagnoses, which you didn’t even suspect about a week ago. What to do: live as before, heal, wait for a new crisis, leave it as it is? As a rule, such a point of no return causes a person to change his life and take the path of least resistance — to give up everything. And only the strong in spirit manage to become even sportier, healthier and overcome everything that can be overcome.
In business, the same story: some external factor can upset the existing balance, shake things up, excite employees. And now the pleasant office with the same coffee with cookies and chatter in the morning turns into a buzzing swarm, terrarium or serpentarium. The struggle of all against all begins. And the whole business: for example, they implemented a CRM system, an intranet, a project management system.
Of course, such cases, on the one hand, may seem like casuistry: it is not so easy to change something in a well-functioning business that fulfills goals and knows how to distribute tasks. On the other hand, the experience of the RegionSoft CRM development team such companies also need to search, and therefore any implementation of software for all will necessarily entail either dissatisfaction, or changes, or the discovery of some very unpleasant processes.
I propose today to plunge into pessimism and understand what to expect and how bad it is.
This is the first thing that can be encountered by introducing new corporate software. Employees are too lazy to transfer data (those that need to be transferred manually after migration and / or import), too lazy to master a new interface, too lazy to learn and understand in particular the use of software. Employees refuse to include a CRM system or any other program in their business processes. It looks like a strike, a boycott, work of lobby groups, but in 90% of cases it’s just laziness and unwillingness to figure it out.
There are many measures to adapt employees to the new program (we have already written about them here and here), but before you do something, you need to figure out what you are dealing with. If this is really a boycott and the reasons lie in the plane of inconvenience of use, fears of total control or complexity of development, then you need to train, build a knowledge base, educate domestic experts and early followers, thereby seeking loyalty and acceptance. And if this is laziness, then the measures should be more firm and decisive: temporary inclusion of automation utilization indicators in KPI, control of data entry and completeness, work on setting up the system for each user, training and even control of knowledge in the form of a test or survey. There is nothing fierce about this - you just form the habit of literate use of software in order to improve the performance of the employees themselves.
This is one of the main reasons for the active resistance on the part of CRM users. The fact is that in CRM, the head of the department and the head of the company see absolutely all clients and transactions (unless a special rule is provided), and some managers who are used to “negotiating” and building relationships with clients, including outside corporate interest, do not like it . “What is this?” - you can ask. And the truth is: a person works, attracted a client, serves him, is a personal manager, and here on you - show the details. That's the way it sounds, but! The client was attracted during working hours thanks to the promotion paid by the company, the manager whose work is paid, and the funds that belong to the company. That is, the manager receives compensation for his work with the client. Everything,
The introduction of a CRM system instantly reveals such figures: they either stumble and lead the resistance, or whine and criticize the CRM system, persuading the manager to switch to a more “safe” for them or no option, or leave (with the client base in his pocket). Solve this problem should be delicately.
Well, in any case, even before the first conversation, it is worthwhile to concern yourself with the security of the client base: make all possible backups of the base, temporarily restrict access to operations in the CRM system, control the movement of information from the company to external sources (copying, sending via mail or instant messengers, uploading to the cloud, print, work with devices, etc.).
You are not waiting for them, but they will appear as soon as you decide to set up your first business process. For some reason, it is believed that business process automation is necessary only for large companies with complex employee interaction schemes. By no means. We would recommend to automate all repetitive chains of actions even to the smallest business.For example, an advertising agency of 5 people - what kind of business processes are there ... But day after day they a) interact with customers, give a brief, discuss, take in work, perform tasks, make edits b) apply to third-party production companies, make out and take orders for the production of their creatives. It's minimum. And these are very complex and sensitive processes, as they are associated with many responsible ones, they have a lot of parameters of time, correspondence, documents, approvals. Without automation, failure is inevitable. Moreover, in order to automate a business process, it is not necessary to study the BPMN notation and force employees to do it. We are in RegionSoft CRMWe chose and implemented another solution: all processes are built in a user-friendly visual editor, you can use the wizard. More complex processes can be set up by your administrator or ourselves after agreement with the customer. Thus, there is no reason to abandon the use of automated business processes in a company of any scale.
So, if you start to automate your processes (that is, to prescribe in the program chains of actions you are accustomed to, to set up reminders, deadlines, events and responsible ones), you will find that some processes are completely irrelevant or require changes, but at the same time take a lot of time from your employees. For example, this may be the process of preparing an irrelevant report or filling out unnecessary forms.Therefore, before you automate:
After that, you can create a business process in the interface of the CRM-system, and in the future its instance will be launched at the right moment.
By the way, this knowledge should not be solely a privilege of leadership. At a minimum, department heads need to understand how their work affects the amount of revenue, what actions lead to an increase in sales and payments. Here is a sample list of what a company might not know about itself:
These are basic things that companies manage not to track as long as there is a profit and the business keeps afloat with confidence. CRM helps to make the analysis of such information regular.
Even if you do not set yourself a research or analytical goal, after installing a CRM system and accumulating information in it, important insights appear by themselves: when viewing charts, reports, monitoring the sales funnel. Knowing customers in exact numbers is the key to a significant increase in revenue due to segmentation, personalization, active work in low season.
Security is perhaps the most important aspect of a CRM system in the commercial sphere. Above, we have already said that the CRM-system helps to identify the "holders" of fragments of the client base in a company who do not want to contribute their own knowledge to the base. This is a more or less obvious security breach of commercial information. There are more serious problems ( about which we wrote in detail ), among them:
These problems are rather unobvious and, not having a CRM system, a steep system administrator or an evil security service, it is rather difficult to identify and, moreover, prevent incidents - it turns out only after the fact. Implementing CRM is a relatively inexpensive and universal way to protect commercial information and learn about the incident at the time of the offense, and not after a couple of months when the information begins to work for a competitor. In the CRM systemall actions are logged, you can control the uploading of data, correspondence with clients, track the fact of generating reports, etc. An equally important role is played by the mechanism of separation of access rights and the possibility of protection using a physical key. And this means that even a very small company can afford information security components, which it does not care about in vain.
This situation can happen to any company. For example, a manager is interested in analytics, but he does not collect or accumulate data, but trusts his subordinates. They, in turn, may inadvertently make mistakes or deliberately overstate performance (for example, consider dealer sales of SIM-cards not by actual connections, but by simcards given, but keep silent about the units of measurement in the report. It seems nothing criminal, but the indicator is too high - the real volume of subscribers, from which you can expect the dealer income from payments below), can provide data in the context in which it is beneficial or convenient for them to achieve KPI. This problem is especially evident in companies with branches or divisions that accumulate data: there is no uniform data format, there is no collection methodology, there are no processing rules and centralized storage, and as a result, a lot of fragmented information that you need to kill for a couple of days. Therefore, most often clogged up - there is a profit, okay.
In general, this situation may seem acceptable as long as the profit grows (unless, of course, you are interested in tracking growth points and doing even more). But as soon as the crisis begins, analytical problems begin to drown the company: no one can adequately and convincingly analyze the causes of the fall, the sources of income are not clear, the structure of the client base is unclear, etc. Ultimately, management is forced to make all decisions blindly.
The CRM system accumulates and stores all information centrally and a top manager or employee can get the necessary report in a couple of clicks in the context and for the period that are relevant to solve the problem (for example, in RegionSoft CRMover 100 reports, and those that do not exist, can be finished by using the report designer yourself or ordered from the vendor). Thus, subject to the filling of CRM data, you always have access to complete and reliable information regardless of how many employees, departments or branches you have.
It also happens: there is data, it is collected and even discussed at meetings, but it is aggregated in Excel files, stored locally with employees, not unified, etc. The result is that there is no single array of information that gives a complete understanding of the situation.
A real-life example: three outlets, the managers of each of them collect sales data into an Excel file with the same columns, everything is transparent. The end of the period, the files are transferred to the sales department, and then it turns out that the plan is not fulfilled. The month is closed, KPI are calculated taking into account the shortfall of the plan. No one would have bothered about the cause if it were not for the offended sales staff who did not like the small KPI markup at all. She collected the files and began to recount everything as it was, the plan was not made. Then she drew attention to the fractional numbers like this: sold 256.76 sets. How come? It turned out that the RRR, which collected the data, did not pay attention to the fact that in one file there was not a numerical, but a percentage data type. More precisely, he drew, mechanically transformed and consolidated in his own table, and then at least the grass did not grow.
Such a problem occurs quite often and, it seems, in 2018, it is at least strange to talk about the importance of collecting and correctly organizing data. Especially when there is a CRM system in which you just need to enter different data about transactions and events, and at the output to receive an ordered array of information, good analytics and secure storage. And yes, KPI will be calculated automatically (at least in RegionSoft CRM ).
Even worse, when the client base is not organized: the data is stored in a variety of sources and forms, information about a particular transaction can be tracked only by documents or conversations of letters. This is almost a disaster. First, such storage of information is not safe and all contacts, transactions, commercial data are essentially owned by managers, and secondly, with a probability close to 100%, there is a large proportion of lost customers and customers stuck in the “first contact” status. Suppose you have one million rubles on your personal card. Are you ready to distribute it to your colleagues right now, and send 200 thousand to your competitors by the new year? Not. Actually, squandering customer information looks just as stupid.
The solution is simple: initially absolutely all CRM systems are created to store comprehensive information about customers, transactions, related documents, and preferably also about correspondence, calls, and so on. Just select one of them.
Sources of time consumption can be different: complex communication and coordination, lengthy processes, ordinary procrastination. They are growing like a snowball, and they are pulling the disruption of any deadlines. And it’s good, if we are talking about, for example, development (well, the release is delayed, it will come out a little later, badly, but all right), but it’s terrible if it’s about supplies, urgent work, transport, medicine, etc. Termination is a reputational loss, lost money and customers. So, you need even more investments in public relations, the search for new customers, the restoration of trust. In this way, a small note of one employee can provoke a bunch of problems. The worst thing is that you can not notice this problem or not know from what and from whom it comes.
If you implement a CRM system, the time spent on work tasks will be fairly transparently calculated. This is by no means an ugly time tracker for an employee (forget about them if you want to work with normal people who respect themselves and you), but it’s time control. Within a customized business process or an assigned task, there is a time frame, in case of violation of which CRM responds and notifies which side the question is ( for example, the general forgot to sign an invoice for online advertising). A process holder or person responsible for a stage may recall a problem. However, no nods and shifting responsibility. You will immediately see what takes a lot of time and what tasks you should focus on: for example, swap managers (again, in two clicks to reassign the task), select an additional resource, create a reminder, etc.
Companies go “by instrument” and do not care at all to work on the strategy and plan. They earned 5 million in June - well, in August they got stuck at 0.6 million, well, nothing's left there. There is no planning, taking into account the seasonality factor (and not only the vendors of skis and motorboats have it, but also developers, outsourcers and all of IT, including it), and resource allocation. This state of affairs is fraught with a sharp entrance into a state of crisis against the background of financial exhaustion - in other words, where it is thin, it breaks there. As soon as you install and run a CRM system, you will immediately feel that you are doing something wrong, because it will ask for a plan, suggest a plan-actual analysis, etc.
Of course, planning and forecasting should be: resource, personal, collective, etc. This good habit will be formed among the first CRM users. For example, in RegionSoft CRM specifically for this purpose, various functions are implemented, including a set of planners in which you can estimate the workload of a team up to a three-week horizon.
They are extremely difficult to track without a CRM system (or at least a ticket system) - in many respects because modern customers no longer complain, they are silently turning to competitors, which are enough in any field. You do not see the change in the status of the transaction and the client, do not read the comments on it, can not listen to the controversial call for the purpose of quality control, training or debriefing. Consider a black box between you and clients, and in it is the responsibility (or irresponsibility) of your employees. Guess which card plays more often?
When you have a CRM system, you can see (or request, if you don’t see) the status of the client, its changes, managers' comments on each phase of the interaction, all correspondence, chat with the client, telephone conversations with him. So, you can control the situation and predict any problem before it comes.
The fact that the listed problems (all or some) exist in almost every company is not a big deal. The danger is that they are not identified on time and continue to influence absolutely all processes, reducing the potential for working better and earning more. Therefore, it is worthwhile to treat the implementation of a CRM system not as an acquisition of an electronic notebook, but as an installation of serious, effective and convenient software that can help diagnose problems as soon as possible. And then, you know, late to drink Borjomi, when the kidneys refused.
In business, the same story: some external factor can upset the existing balance, shake things up, excite employees. And now the pleasant office with the same coffee with cookies and chatter in the morning turns into a buzzing swarm, terrarium or serpentarium. The struggle of all against all begins. And the whole business: for example, they implemented a CRM system, an intranet, a project management system.
Of course, such cases, on the one hand, may seem like casuistry: it is not so easy to change something in a well-functioning business that fulfills goals and knows how to distribute tasks. On the other hand, the experience of the RegionSoft CRM development team such companies also need to search, and therefore any implementation of software for all will necessarily entail either dissatisfaction, or changes, or the discovery of some very unpleasant processes.
I propose today to plunge into pessimism and understand what to expect and how bad it is.
Total employee laziness
This is the first thing that can be encountered by introducing new corporate software. Employees are too lazy to transfer data (those that need to be transferred manually after migration and / or import), too lazy to master a new interface, too lazy to learn and understand in particular the use of software. Employees refuse to include a CRM system or any other program in their business processes. It looks like a strike, a boycott, work of lobby groups, but in 90% of cases it’s just laziness and unwillingness to figure it out. There are many measures to adapt employees to the new program (we have already written about them here and here), but before you do something, you need to figure out what you are dealing with. If this is really a boycott and the reasons lie in the plane of inconvenience of use, fears of total control or complexity of development, then you need to train, build a knowledge base, educate domestic experts and early followers, thereby seeking loyalty and acceptance. And if this is laziness, then the measures should be more firm and decisive: temporary inclusion of automation utilization indicators in KPI, control of data entry and completeness, work on setting up the system for each user, training and even control of knowledge in the form of a test or survey. There is nothing fierce about this - you just form the habit of literate use of software in order to improve the performance of the employees themselves.
“Own” transactions and clients from technical support managers and sales managers
This is one of the main reasons for the active resistance on the part of CRM users. The fact is that in CRM, the head of the department and the head of the company see absolutely all clients and transactions (unless a special rule is provided), and some managers who are used to “negotiating” and building relationships with clients, including outside corporate interest, do not like it . “What is this?” - you can ask. And the truth is: a person works, attracted a client, serves him, is a personal manager, and here on you - show the details. That's the way it sounds, but! The client was attracted during working hours thanks to the promotion paid by the company, the manager whose work is paid, and the funds that belong to the company. That is, the manager receives compensation for his work with the client. Everything,The introduction of a CRM system instantly reveals such figures: they either stumble and lead the resistance, or whine and criticize the CRM system, persuading the manager to switch to a more “safe” for them or no option, or leave (with the client base in his pocket). Solve this problem should be delicately.
- If an employee is valuable and does his job excellently, it is worth talking to him directly, perhaps even offering a salary or bonus increase. Such compensation will allow to save the employee and at the same time to get full transparency of the client base.
- If an employee is private, but at the same time arises in a single person and does not drag anyone in particular, you should talk with him and tell him that the client base belongs to the company. Often a strict conversation returns the company a normal employee, especially if he holds the place.
- If excitement is observed in several people and you understand that they got “business in business”, it is worth taking the risk and updating the sales department, retaining only loyal employees - alas, sometimes you don't need to move the beds, but change the girls. Although it is more expensive.
Well, in any case, even before the first conversation, it is worthwhile to concern yourself with the security of the client base: make all possible backups of the base, temporarily restrict access to operations in the CRM system, control the movement of information from the company to external sources (copying, sending via mail or instant messengers, uploading to the cloud, print, work with devices, etc.).
Zombie business processes
You are not waiting for them, but they will appear as soon as you decide to set up your first business process. For some reason, it is believed that business process automation is necessary only for large companies with complex employee interaction schemes. By no means. We would recommend to automate all repetitive chains of actions even to the smallest business.For example, an advertising agency of 5 people - what kind of business processes are there ... But day after day they a) interact with customers, give a brief, discuss, take in work, perform tasks, make edits b) apply to third-party production companies, make out and take orders for the production of their creatives. It's minimum. And these are very complex and sensitive processes, as they are associated with many responsible ones, they have a lot of parameters of time, correspondence, documents, approvals. Without automation, failure is inevitable. Moreover, in order to automate a business process, it is not necessary to study the BPMN notation and force employees to do it. We are in RegionSoft CRMWe chose and implemented another solution: all processes are built in a user-friendly visual editor, you can use the wizard. More complex processes can be set up by your administrator or ourselves after agreement with the customer. Thus, there is no reason to abandon the use of automated business processes in a company of any scale. So, if you start to automate your processes (that is, to prescribe in the program chains of actions you are accustomed to, to set up reminders, deadlines, events and responsible ones), you will find that some processes are completely irrelevant or require changes, but at the same time take a lot of time from your employees. For example, this may be the process of preparing an irrelevant report or filling out unnecessary forms.Therefore, before you automate:
- need to review the processes for relevance
- in a separate document to prescribe the stages, dates, events and responsible
- determine the frequency of each process
- prioritize.
After that, you can create a business process in the interface of the CRM-system, and in the future its instance will be launched at the right moment.
Misunderstanding of the sources of business revenue
By the way, this knowledge should not be solely a privilege of leadership. At a minimum, department heads need to understand how their work affects the amount of revenue, what actions lead to an increase in sales and payments. Here is a sample list of what a company might not know about itself:- how the assortment works: what is in demand, what needs to be stimulated and what is long overdue to withdraw from sale
- What is the portrait of a loyal user: this is the one who buys once a year for 100 thousand rubles. and gets a gold card or one who spends an average of 500 rubles a day, but because of a bad loyalty program has nothing?
- What is the structure of cash flow: sources, segments, frequency of payments, average payment, etc.
- what is the seasonality of the company, what exactly is it due to and what parameters does the cash flow have in the low and high season
- what triggers best influence sales (mailings, discounts, general November madness, or, for example, the speaker’s speech at the All-Russian Forum).
These are basic things that companies manage not to track as long as there is a profit and the business keeps afloat with confidence. CRM helps to make the analysis of such information regular.
Even if you do not set yourself a research or analytical goal, after installing a CRM system and accumulating information in it, important insights appear by themselves: when viewing charts, reports, monitoring the sales funnel. Knowing customers in exact numbers is the key to a significant increase in revenue due to segmentation, personalization, active work in low season.
Security flaws
Security is perhaps the most important aspect of a CRM system in the commercial sphere. Above, we have already said that the CRM-system helps to identify the "holders" of fragments of the client base in a company who do not want to contribute their own knowledge to the base. This is a more or less obvious security breach of commercial information. There are more serious problems ( about which we wrote in detail ), among them:- risk of care manager together with the client base
- risk of transmitting significant commercial information to competitors (through networks, cloud services, copying, transferring passwords from corporate services)
- sabotage by former employees
- periodic problems with the "redistribution" of clients between managers
- random distribution of commercial information (for example, during a conversation with a client), etc.
These problems are rather unobvious and, not having a CRM system, a steep system administrator or an evil security service, it is rather difficult to identify and, moreover, prevent incidents - it turns out only after the fact. Implementing CRM is a relatively inexpensive and universal way to protect commercial information and learn about the incident at the time of the offense, and not after a couple of months when the information begins to work for a competitor. In the CRM systemall actions are logged, you can control the uploading of data, correspondence with clients, track the fact of generating reports, etc. An equally important role is played by the mechanism of separation of access rights and the possibility of protection using a physical key. And this means that even a very small company can afford information security components, which it does not care about in vain.
Distortion of reporting indicators and the game with numbers
This situation can happen to any company. For example, a manager is interested in analytics, but he does not collect or accumulate data, but trusts his subordinates. They, in turn, may inadvertently make mistakes or deliberately overstate performance (for example, consider dealer sales of SIM-cards not by actual connections, but by simcards given, but keep silent about the units of measurement in the report. It seems nothing criminal, but the indicator is too high - the real volume of subscribers, from which you can expect the dealer income from payments below), can provide data in the context in which it is beneficial or convenient for them to achieve KPI. This problem is especially evident in companies with branches or divisions that accumulate data: there is no uniform data format, there is no collection methodology, there are no processing rules and centralized storage, and as a result, a lot of fragmented information that you need to kill for a couple of days. Therefore, most often clogged up - there is a profit, okay.In general, this situation may seem acceptable as long as the profit grows (unless, of course, you are interested in tracking growth points and doing even more). But as soon as the crisis begins, analytical problems begin to drown the company: no one can adequately and convincingly analyze the causes of the fall, the sources of income are not clear, the structure of the client base is unclear, etc. Ultimately, management is forced to make all decisions blindly.
The CRM system accumulates and stores all information centrally and a top manager or employee can get the necessary report in a couple of clicks in the context and for the period that are relevant to solve the problem (for example, in RegionSoft CRMover 100 reports, and those that do not exist, can be finished by using the report designer yourself or ordered from the vendor). Thus, subject to the filling of CRM data, you always have access to complete and reliable information regardless of how many employees, departments or branches you have.
Poorly organized data within the company, lack of customer base
It also happens: there is data, it is collected and even discussed at meetings, but it is aggregated in Excel files, stored locally with employees, not unified, etc. The result is that there is no single array of information that gives a complete understanding of the situation.A real-life example: three outlets, the managers of each of them collect sales data into an Excel file with the same columns, everything is transparent. The end of the period, the files are transferred to the sales department, and then it turns out that the plan is not fulfilled. The month is closed, KPI are calculated taking into account the shortfall of the plan. No one would have bothered about the cause if it were not for the offended sales staff who did not like the small KPI markup at all. She collected the files and began to recount everything as it was, the plan was not made. Then she drew attention to the fractional numbers like this: sold 256.76 sets. How come? It turned out that the RRR, which collected the data, did not pay attention to the fact that in one file there was not a numerical, but a percentage data type. More precisely, he drew, mechanically transformed and consolidated in his own table, and then at least the grass did not grow.
Such a problem occurs quite often and, it seems, in 2018, it is at least strange to talk about the importance of collecting and correctly organizing data. Especially when there is a CRM system in which you just need to enter different data about transactions and events, and at the output to receive an ordered array of information, good analytics and secure storage. And yes, KPI will be calculated automatically (at least in RegionSoft CRM ).
Even worse, when the client base is not organized: the data is stored in a variety of sources and forms, information about a particular transaction can be tracked only by documents or conversations of letters. This is almost a disaster. First, such storage of information is not safe and all contacts, transactions, commercial data are essentially owned by managers, and secondly, with a probability close to 100%, there is a large proportion of lost customers and customers stuck in the “first contact” status. Suppose you have one million rubles on your personal card. Are you ready to distribute it to your colleagues right now, and send 200 thousand to your competitors by the new year? Not. Actually, squandering customer information looks just as stupid.
The solution is simple: initially absolutely all CRM systems are created to store comprehensive information about customers, transactions, related documents, and preferably also about correspondence, calls, and so on. Just select one of them.
Unrealistically big expenses of time for performance of tasks
Sources of time consumption can be different: complex communication and coordination, lengthy processes, ordinary procrastination. They are growing like a snowball, and they are pulling the disruption of any deadlines. And it’s good, if we are talking about, for example, development (well, the release is delayed, it will come out a little later, badly, but all right), but it’s terrible if it’s about supplies, urgent work, transport, medicine, etc. Termination is a reputational loss, lost money and customers. So, you need even more investments in public relations, the search for new customers, the restoration of trust. In this way, a small note of one employee can provoke a bunch of problems. The worst thing is that you can not notice this problem or not know from what and from whom it comes. If you implement a CRM system, the time spent on work tasks will be fairly transparently calculated. This is by no means an ugly time tracker for an employee (forget about them if you want to work with normal people who respect themselves and you), but it’s time control. Within a customized business process or an assigned task, there is a time frame, in case of violation of which CRM responds and notifies which side the question is ( for example, the general forgot to sign an invoice for online advertising). A process holder or person responsible for a stage may recall a problem. However, no nods and shifting responsibility. You will immediately see what takes a lot of time and what tasks you should focus on: for example, swap managers (again, in two clicks to reassign the task), select an additional resource, create a reminder, etc.
Lack of planning and forecasting
Companies go “by instrument” and do not care at all to work on the strategy and plan. They earned 5 million in June - well, in August they got stuck at 0.6 million, well, nothing's left there. There is no planning, taking into account the seasonality factor (and not only the vendors of skis and motorboats have it, but also developers, outsourcers and all of IT, including it), and resource allocation. This state of affairs is fraught with a sharp entrance into a state of crisis against the background of financial exhaustion - in other words, where it is thin, it breaks there. As soon as you install and run a CRM system, you will immediately feel that you are doing something wrong, because it will ask for a plan, suggest a plan-actual analysis, etc.Of course, planning and forecasting should be: resource, personal, collective, etc. This good habit will be formed among the first CRM users. For example, in RegionSoft CRM specifically for this purpose, various functions are implemented, including a set of planners in which you can estimate the workload of a team up to a three-week horizon.
Customer service issues
They are extremely difficult to track without a CRM system (or at least a ticket system) - in many respects because modern customers no longer complain, they are silently turning to competitors, which are enough in any field. You do not see the change in the status of the transaction and the client, do not read the comments on it, can not listen to the controversial call for the purpose of quality control, training or debriefing. Consider a black box between you and clients, and in it is the responsibility (or irresponsibility) of your employees. Guess which card plays more often?When you have a CRM system, you can see (or request, if you don’t see) the status of the client, its changes, managers' comments on each phase of the interaction, all correspondence, chat with the client, telephone conversations with him. So, you can control the situation and predict any problem before it comes.
The fact that the listed problems (all or some) exist in almost every company is not a big deal. The danger is that they are not identified on time and continue to influence absolutely all processes, reducing the potential for working better and earning more. Therefore, it is worthwhile to treat the implementation of a CRM system not as an acquisition of an electronic notebook, but as an installation of serious, effective and convenient software that can help diagnose problems as soon as possible. And then, you know, late to drink Borjomi, when the kidneys refused.
If you have questions about the work and implementation of a CRM system, please contact us at RegionSoft . After several thousand clients, we are hardly mistaken :-)