From designing CRM strategy to implementing CRM software

From designing CRM strategy to implementing CRM software

In order for your organization to get the most out of CRM, you must have a detailed plan that includes: building consensus among business units, building teams, managing change, customer engagement strategy, and user engagement.

In the following, we will review the 8 steps suggested by SugarCRM that can be your guide in this direction.

1.Creating alignment with business goals

Make sure you set your CRM strategy based on your organization’s priorities. To reach this point, identifying the business processes and weak points of the organization in relation to the missionaries has a very important role.

Now, to determine the priorities, ask yourself: “What do we want to do?”, “What are the priorities of our organization in the short and long term and their relationship with CRM?” And “What are the solutions and its implementation plan and its relationship with CRM?” Make sure that implementation planning includes financial forecasting and the time required to analyze and implement the solution.

2.Participation and interaction in the team

The participation of senior managers will be one of the most important factors in achieving success. How is the participation of managers attracted? When the senior manager participates in the design of CRM strategy and believes that the programs that will be implemented will improve business processes, attract and retain customers, and in general, improve the organization’s financial indicators. In this case, you will have the support of the senior manager and the probability of your success will increase dramatically.

After determining the general framework, it is important to involve all stakeholders in the design process. But it is recommended to use CRM experts because an experienced person in this field will help you to see the effects of your solutions in the whole business and choose more effective solutions.

3.Customer participation

In designing a CRM strategy or customer relationship management, you must consider the customer because ultimately an effective interaction must be formed between you and your customers. Therefore, successful customer relationship management sees the business from the customer’s point of view and its goal is to bring the customer to the necessary values. The customer perspective helps you see gaps and opportunities and adopt new and appropriate strategies and processes for your organization.

The project team understands their needs by considering the customer’s views and opinions and identifies the areas that need improvement by considering the existing processes.

4.Get to know your business processes better

Now that you have determined your solutions for improvement, you want to get help from a software system. To get the most out of CRM software, your software and processes must be aligned, so clarify your processes and compare them to the CRM solutions you’re evaluating. (Hopefully, you’re considering and sticking to best practices in your processes when determining improvements!)

Consider the workflows you need, the applications your CRM needs to integrate with, etc. These things will allow you to better evaluate the options in question and also have a better estimate of the cost and time of implementing your system.

5.Prioritizing opportunities

Measure the impact of the solutions on the income and productivity of the organization and talk about it with senior managers. Then study the ROI potential of implementing each solution you implement and compare them to each other. Considering all these things will help you to prioritize your solution implementation plan.
For example, if the accounting department can collect claims from customers faster by accessing sales data, and this will have a great impact on the company’s liquidity, you can prioritize the implementation of the solution for them.

6.Consider the experience and opinions of your users

All strategic efforts are useless if employees don’t use the concept of CRM or customer relationship management, so get the opinions and experiences of employees at every step of the way so that you can achieve more success by taking action.

Also, add new features that users need to your list of requirements. Of course, not all of them will have a high priority, some of them will be implemented and others may never be implemented.

7.Determine the required integrations at the software level

Consider the case that one person in your organization should not work with several different software. Therefore, which software and applications used in your collection do you want to integrate and which systems need to be integrated. After you have reviewed the programs you need, determine a strategy for data integration because it helps a lot in managing information.

8.Monitoring, follow-up, analysis, optimization, evaluation

So start determining the customer relationship management strategy, implement the solutions, look at the outputs regularly. Look at the different aspects of the positive effects of CRM (customer relationship management) in your business, try to find the things that need to be corrected and revise and correct them regularly. Interact with different departments of the organization at different time intervals, get their feedback and review them.