Your Way to a Successful CRM Adoption: Part II

Posted on December 12, 2012 by

In this series, we are exploring the key factors behind user adoption. In part one, we had talked about how to plan for adoption before implementing CRM. In part two, we will discuss four critical post-implementation items.

Part II – After you rollout CRM: Measure and Fine-Tune

Measure user adoption regularly:  Measure your adoption KPIs (key performance indicators) regularly (at least once every month) and realign your business goals accordingly. The KPIs for user adoption vary from CRM usage (number of sign-ins, number of records entered, time spent in CRM, old and obsolete data, etc) to departmental goals of sales, marketing, and customer support.

Provide only one version of data to everyone: The quality of your CRM data is absolutely critical for user adoption. If your users lose their trust in the data from your CRM, they will reject the system. Review, scrub, and de-dupe your data before you import into CRM. Review the data weekly for correctness and relevancy. Provide all your departments with only one version of data to keep everyone on the same page.

Tie adoption to compensation: Identify and reward your strongest adopters. Review how your employees have used CRM during performance reviews. Announce and acknowledge the strongest adopters within the company and promote how they follow best practices.

Provide training including “training the trainers”: If your CRM is intuitive, you probably won’t need to provide excessive training for your users. However, make sure your users are familiar with the best practices of using the system to be productive. Conduct user trainings specifically targeted for different user roles. Ensure that all the users in that role follow the same procedures. Train the administrators extensively so that they are prepared to provide the first line of support and answer user questions.

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Your Way to a Successful CRM Adoption: Part I

Posted on November 29, 2012 by

Poor user adoption is not a new phenomenon for CRM. Though adoption rates have improved over the years with the emergence of SaaS and increasing emphasis on user experience by CRM vendors, according to a 2011 report by CSO Insights, only 38 percent of the Small and Medium Businesses have achieved 75 percent+ CRM adoption rates.

In this three part series, we will explore the key factors behind user adoption.

Part I – Before you get ready to rollout CRM – plan, plan, and plan some more

Define what CRM means for your company:  Every organization’s definition of CRM is different. Before you begin to look at technologies and CRM vendors, define your CRM goals and review your existing customer facing processes. Involve all your key departments – IT, sales, marketing, support, and finance – to standardize and streamline your processes.

You should also define the success criteria and metrics in terms of user adoption, expected business results, and ROI (Return on Investment).  At the end of this exercise, you should have a clear idea on how CRM will support your business strategy.

Plan your rollouts in phases: Plan your CRM rollouts in phases so that your users get to experience CRM in bite-sized pieces. Start with your sales or support department. Make sure your super users and users are on board and their expectations are clearly defined and measurable. Plan to start with a pilot rollout containing a minimum feature set.

Decide who will own CRM: Specify a department that will “own” CRM. Do this in collaboration with your key departments. In many organizations, the process of selecting a CRM is owned by IT.  However, many successful CRM rollouts show us that end user groups like sales or marketing is more adept in owning this process.

Elect a CRM champion: Elect a “champion” from the department that will own CRM. Give the champion overall accountability to drive user adoption and evangelize CRM within the organization.

Identify administrators and super users: Select administrators and “super users” from key departments who will represent their departments during the rollout and build a consensus around CRM within the department. Make sure the super users have sufficient influence to represent their departments.

Involve your executives: Get your executives to commit to CRM around a common set of goals and objectives and a mutually agreed upon timeline.

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Six Ways to Manage Customer Experiences

Posted on November 8, 2012 by

In this digital age, your customers are accustomed to increasingly diverse options to interact with you and provide feedback. According to Forrester’s 2012 Customer Experience Index, over two thirds of the brands surveyed scored between “ok” and “very poor” in customer experience. In this recovering economy, when you are forced to streamline your operations and reduce costs on most fronts, how do you keep up with these increasing levels of service expectations?

Consolidate your customer service systems and processes 

Like most companies, you probably have multiple systems to manage your customer service processes. Often, these systems are based on different technologies and remain in silos. If you haven’t done it already, invest in a CRM system that would combine all these systems together.

Review your existing customer service process and find out the weak links. Where are the bottlenecks? Are your customers dropping off at a certain point in your process? Which steps in the process are taking the most time and manual interventions? Use your CRM Customer Management Softwaresystem to streamline and implement an efficient customer service process that is followed by all your of departments.

Utilize multiple customer service channels

Today’s customers expect a fast response and expect it from multiple service channels. Effective service channels include customer portals, mobile apps, knowledge bases, interactive FAQs, social media, web chat, and email. Social and mobile channels are increasingly becoming the preferred channel of choice for customers to interact with businesses.

A flexible set of access methods helps your customers find information based on their preference. In a successful customer centric strategy, different service channels work seamlessly with each other and yet provide quality and relevant information that can be easily accessed.

Provide a self-service experience

It usually takes more time, money, and hard work to get new customers, and it’s important to hold on to the customers you already have. An easy-to-use, 24×7 self-service portal will offer convenience, timely and relevant information, and overall a better experience for your customers. Customers can view what they need at their own pace including order history, tickets, payments, answers to questions, etc.

Use analytics to measure customer loyalty and behavior and gather feedback from integrated surveys. A self-service solution can increase your transparency and maintain your customer’s trust.

Empower all your departments

Make sure all of your departments see the same customer information and history. For example, if your customer calls your support number to ask about an open order, do not transfer the line to your billing department. Make sure all customer information – address, contacts, notes, emails, support tickets, quotes, purchase orders, and invoices are available in one place for easy reference.

Use an up-to-date knowledge base to provide your support staff easy access to answers, which are consistent for everyone.

Allow easy escalations within your company

Provide a clear line of escalation within your service departments that goes all the way to a senior executive. Make the escalation path and contact information readily available to your customers.

Set up automatic escalations and red flags in your CRM system. For example, set up an escalation to automatically notify your support manager if a critical issue remains unresolved over a certain amount of time.

Make it easy for customers to provide feedback

Make it easy for your customers to provide feedback. Invest in a Voice of Customer (VoC) program and make rating and feedback collection a part of all your support channels. Setup a closed loop feedback process that ensures that every feedback receives your attention.

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5 Reasons You Should Consider SaaS (Or Not)

Posted on October 26, 2012 by

As a business owner, do you constantly worry about maintaining business systems and infrastructure? To run a successful business, you need to be free to focus on your customers and business objectives. For many small and mid-sized businesses, SaaS  (Software As A Service) has become the obvious choice  for implementing business systems. Is SaaS for you? Read on to find out …

Five reasons why SaaS may be the right choice for you

  • There are no upfront capital expenses to buy hardware or recruit IT staff. Since the software is hosted elsewhere, the expensive but critical IT tasks such as maintaining servers, data backups, and disaster recovery measures are no longer needed.
  • SaaS  vendors typically offer an online free trial. This makes hands-on evaluations fast, affordable and instantly gratifying.
  • SaaS is typically subscription based. Users subscribe to the SaaS software with month-to-month or yearly payment options without upfront financial commitments.
  • The newer breed of web 2.0 SaaS products offer a greater degree of usability and a superior user experience. This leads to better user adoption with higher chances of implementation success.
  • Application upgrades and feature enhancements are automatic and seamless with SaaS. Automatic upgrades in a fully managed application environment were an utopian scenario for the older on-premise installations, where an upgrade often meant re-doing all the customizations.

Five reasons why SaaS may not be the right choice for you

  • An obvious but often overlooked requirement for SaaS is that needs an active internet connection. However, this is becoming a non-issue with the advent of mobile technologies where business software is being increasingly consumed from smartphones and tablets.
  • For companies with complex customization and integration requirements, SaaS might not be a suitable choice. Integration has always been the Achilles heel for SaaS solutions. They have tried to alleviate this with deeper API capabilities and integration partnerships leading to a value added eco-system of partner created integrated solutions.
  • SaaS is also not a suitable choice for companies with concerns over data security and privacy. In many industries, there are additional stricter regulations for privacy that many SaaS solutions might not adhere to. An example would be the HIPAA regulation for the health case industry.
  • SaaS has been reported to build up a higher Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over a long period of time with increasingly long term operating cost.
  • Earlier SaaS vendors used to offer only yearly subscriptions with complicated lock-ins and numerous fine prints. However, this trend has changed significantly and nowadays almost everyone offers a month-to-month contract without extra commitments.
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Tips For Selecting a Marketing Automation System For Mid Sized Businesses

Posted on October 12, 2012 by

Prior to the selection of a Marketing Automation system, it’s important to find a company that will work with you and fit the technology to your needs. Larger vendors have traditionally looked at the mid market as a simple downgrading of their enterprise wide solutions without any particular focus on the specific nuances of mid size business needs. A scaled down version of an application designed for a large enterprise probably won’t meet the needs of a mid-sized company as well as an application designed specifically for the mid market.

You should base your ultimate decision on your organization’s specific requirements, but the following tips will provide a good start:

  • The most important thing to look for when exploring solutions in Marketing Automation is a technology partner with enough experience in the mid market to understand your problems and needs.The most frequent mistake in mid market companies is to believe that CRM is simply software and not a relationship with a technology company. Effective solutions can only be created when a technology partner takes the time to analyze your current methods, needs, staffing and goals.
  • Marketing Automation solutions should have the flexibility to work as part of a larger CRM solution provided by the vendor or be adaptable by that vendor to software solutions you may already have successfully implemented.

    Marketing solutions may be advantageous on their own, but true integration with other customer touch points is a valuable and powerful component in the concept of one-to-one marketing. Any customer is only as loyal as their last interaction with your company; therefore, the implementation of an effective marketing automation system as part of an overall CRM solution needs to extend into the policies and people of your organization.

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Make Integrated CRM Work For You

Posted on September 28, 2012 by

In this difficult economy, it is important for your company to work as a team to create and maintain successful customer relationships. Your business revolves around your customers, their needs and their issues. Typically, communication with customers and prospects often involves a number of departments like sales, engineering, marketing, accounting, and customer support. In most companies, these departments still use separate systems becoming ‘islands of information’ preventing the sharing of this valuable customer knowledge.

Here’s why you will benefit from an integrated CRM:Single vendor - seamless communication

All of your departments will have the same experience 

Your users will experience the same interface across all your departments. Your entire company will communicate in the same way with the same information at hand. For example, when marketing sends a campaign to a targeted list, your sales managers will get immediate visibility to that. When customer service provides a solution to a customer, sales similarly, will have visibility to that solution.

You’ll have better visibility into key customer processes

Your executives will have better visibility into key customer processes. These include lead flow, the opportunity pipeline, sales forecasts, issues from key customers, visibility into the customer support process, and monitoring of product engineering.

Your sales team will improve efficiency

Your sales team will become more effective. When they are in contact with the customer or sales prospect, they have all the information needed right at hand. This improves the effectiveness of the sales rep’s communication with the customer and can improve closing ratios and gross margins.

You’ll have to manage only one vendor

With multiple vendors, you need to manage multiple relationships and communicate to multiple vendors wasting valuable time and resources. You won’t have to manage the recurring task of reviewing multiple invoices every month. Remember all that time you wasted during searching, reviewing, sitting in on hours of demos, pricing and interviewing third party suppliers?

You’ll reduce IT systems cost

With an integrated CRM system, your company will have fewer systems to deploy and support. This will decrease your overall IT systems cost.

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Closing More Sales with Sales Automation

Posted on September 21, 2012 by

Let’s face it; there is one challenge that a lot of small and medium sized businesses face and that is, the need to keep closing sales. As a business owner, working very hard to reach your set goals is given; but when all your hard work is not paying off you will need to ensure that you implement a strategy to help you meet your set goals. One way you can do this is through Sales Automation. Sales automation is simply placing your business’ sales processes in a format that does not require you to be physically present.

This may mean that you will write an awesome sales letter that will cause your target market to want to purchase your product(s) and or service(s) without the need to meet you face to face. This could also mean putting up a website and an email system designed to reach out to your prospective customers/clients and makes your offer compelling enough to make them want to patronize your business.

You may be thinking “Nah, selling my products will require face-to-face interaction; so, I’ll pass on the sales automation process thank you very much.”

Okay, here’s the thing – you only have 24 hours in one day! You cannot meet your entire targeted prospects personally; some people might be too busy to see you. So, if the success of your company still remains solidly tied to being able to shake hands with each prospect; we hate to break it to you, but you will be limiting your future earning severely.

Rather than being the stumbling-block to the success of your company, it is better to find a way to effectively package what you are offering so that you can automate your sales process. When you do this, you will be able to dream of having a bigger and better cash flow.  It is important that you learn to use sales automation tools such as opt-in pages, email templates, document management, lead management and sales forecasting to boost your closing percentage. To really boost your business exponentially, you should look into sales automation software, also known as CRM (customer Relationship Management) software. As soon as you successfully automate part or all of your business’ sales processes, you will notice that your closing ratio and your bottom line will receive a significant boost.

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