Before reviewing your current CRM software, let's first differentiate the customer-facing teams from the back-office ones. Both will need to use the CRM software to improve their workflows, but not the same way. You need to understand the needs of both.
Differentiate Customer-Facing and Back Office Teams
Customer-facing departments like marketing, sales, customer service, and operations use numerous metrics to monitor and guide performance. These metrics allow you to understand and control the risks of substandard service.
Customer-facing teams such as marketing, sales, and customer service are the primary users of your CRM software, but depending on how your organization is set up, back-office teams may often use it too. The back-office or support teams also need to monitor the customer journey, so they can:
Plan adjustments to HR, hardware, and software resources depending on the activity.
Calculate parts of employee or subcontractor revenue, which can vary based on performance.
Estimate and control the level of the commercial risk being run.
Review Your CRM Software
So, what can trigger a review of your CRM software?
There are five main reasons for you to do this:
Lack of support from the company providing the CRM software.
The employees can't master or understand the CRM software because of bad UX, lack of training, etc.
A significant change in the software itself.
A change in ownership of the company providing your CRM software.
A regulation change (such as GDPR) with which your current CRM software is not compliant.
More competitive CRM software on the market, based on either price or functionality.
Also, take the time to analyze how the current data is being used before setting up its collection again for the new tool. Is all of it still useful? You may be able to live without some data!
Equally, you may find new data sources to include that add real value to your CRM strategy, perhaps from other projects for a new example stock control system that your organization has recently invested in.
Ensure Data Quality
For both business and reporting indicators, you need to zoom in and zoom out at will, as if you were observing them from a helicopter:
Each event should be tagged with time, date, location, and customer ID.
For every piece of data you collect and store, be transparent about how it is collected, who is collecting it, what it is going to be used for, and what permission you have to store and use it.
Let's Recap!
Customer-facing teams such as marketing, sales, and customer service are the primary users of your CRM software; however, depending on how your organization is set up, back-office teams may often use it too.
The reasons to change your selection of CRM software can be technical, regulatory, or organizational.
When changing CRM software, make sure to re-evaluate your data requirements - you may need to add or remove data sources from your CRM software.
You've just seen how you can make sure your CRM software is constantly aligned with the company's goals. The next chapter will reveal how each team can contribute to the marketing strategy.
