Choosing the CRM Solution for Your Business Date:   Wednesday , November 03, 2010 With customer satisfaction and customer delight being the cornerstone of success in today’s corporate world, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) plays a vital role in ensuring organizational efficiency and success. From enhancing relationships with existing customers, identification of potential customers, assessing customer needs, serving as a sales and marketing enabler to ensuring efficient dissemination of customer information throughout an organization, Customer Relationship Management is an efficient business strategy that uses technology to not only organize and automate customer-centric business processes but also strengthen customer relationships and offer increased customer value. In today’s highly competent CRM vendors market, choosing an ideal CRM solution can be challenging. The key to identifying the right CRM solution lies in understanding how it will address your overall corporate goals and objectives. The first step in selecting an ideal CRM solution is to identify the specific CRM objectives to be addressed. How can customer relationships be strengthened? Is there a need for marketing, sales and service activity automation? How can customer service be improved? How can operating costs be reduced? Is there a unified source of customer information available to employees across the organization? Identifying these CRM objectives, linking them with the overall corporate objectives and ensuring active leadership involvement from day one will determine how effective a CRM solution can be to your business. Perhaps the most important factor to consider when choosing a CRM solution is the level of functionality required. Does the solution offer real-time updates of customer information and feature detailed analysis, tracking and forecasting capabilities? Does it address the automation of each module in the marketing, sales and service lifecycles? What are the various customer touch points or communication channels supported? Does the solution offer a complete, unified view of customer information and interaction? These are some of the key functionality considerations to be observed. Cost efficiency is another major deciding factor while considering a CRM solution. As in the case of any investment, the ROI should justify the investment. In today’s era of customer experience, fostering customer relationships yields bigger returns. CRM solutions enable considerable reductions in operating costs and contribute to higher revenues. Conducting a cost-benefit analysis plays a vital role in realizing the need of a CRM solution. Ascertaining if the CRM solution is to be On-Premise or Hosted should also be factored in while considering a CRM solution. Data security considerations should be given paramount importance while deciding on an on-premise or hosted solution. While hosted solutions yield a faster return on investment, on-promise solutions ensures data security. Organizations should, therefore, weigh out the balance between faster ROI versus security considerations. Is the CRM solution scalable to accommodate future growth and evolve with growing business requirements? As businesses grow, the need for CRM solutions to expand in a cost-efficient manner will be critical in ensuring the effectiveness of the CRM solution in the long run. Users that anticipate growth should ensure CRM solutions are capable of being rapidly scalable without disrupting existing systems and IT infrastructure. How soon can the CRM solution be deployed? In today’s fast paced world, time is money and rapid deployment time plays an important role in realizing faster ROI of a CRM solution. While rapid deployment is essential, it should not come at the cost of quality. An ideal CRM solution should adhere to rapid deployment schedules while ensuring quality and catering to complexity and customization requirements. CRM solutions revolve around customer focus and customer centricity. Customizing to cater to the demanding customer requirements is of paramount importance in any industry and more so in the CRM industry. While seeking a CRM solution, determining the level of customization required and ensuring the CRM vendor can cater to these requirements is essential. A background check on the CRM vendors’ experience, client list and product maturity can be a rewarding exercise in deciding if they will be able to cater to specific requirements. Does the CRM solution feature localization support with local language options and local support capabilities? This is particularly useful when dealing with international customers. Ease of integration with existing legacy systems is one of the key concerns when implementing a CRM solution. The ability to make upgrades and enhancements to the existing IT infrastructure without altering the existing IT infrastructure should be another parameter to be kept in mind while choosing a CRM solution. One of the key reasons that cause the unsuccessful utilization of a CRM solution is inadequate user adoption. Ensuring the application user interface is familiar to the user and highly user friendly is imperative to the efficient use of the CRM solution. Does the solution offer easy navigation and offer a unified, 360? view of customer information by integrating data from various channels? An easy-to-use solution that is self explanatory will ensure less staff training, lesser implementation costs, efficient user adoption and faster ROI. Choosing an ideal CRM solution catered to specific business requirements can make a world of difference not only to customer relationships but organizational profitability as well. Clearly established expectations and objectives by both user and vendor coupled with committed management involvement and dedicated user adoption will seal the deal in realizing a satisfying and rewarding CRM experience.