You may be one of those companies that have bet on a CRM to improve their customer experience. The goal? To get to know your customers better in order to provide them with a smooth and personalized experience and, consequently, to promote satisfaction, loyalty and recommendation.
But what about today? Does your CRM meet all your expectations? After several weeks, months or even years of use, are you satisfied with your tool? Is the expected ROI there? Maybe your project hasn't even seen the light of day yet but is dragging on, to your great despair!
In any case, whether you have questions or not, regularly taking stock of your CRM project, its use and its benefits allows you to strengthen its use and, if necessary, adapt your actions.
Because the consequences of a poorly or under-exploited CRM are numerous: loss of time and money, team fatigue, drop in turnover, customer dissatisfaction, poor anticipation of the future, strategic errors, internal and external confusion... If your CRM is not used optimally, you risk losing out a lot.
So it's time to sit down and take stock.
Here are 9 signs that it's time to change your CRM.
1 – Your objectives are not being met and your KPIs are not improving
Implementing a CRM project addresses two major issues: optimizing the business and improving the performance of a company. To do this, realistic and measurable objectives as well as KPIs must be defined upstream of the project and monitored regularly. They allow you to move in the right direction and adapt, if necessary, the development axes. For your part, you logically had to define them when framing your project and must analyze them regularly. If they evolve in the right direction, so much the better! Otherwise, if after several reorientations and a reasonable waiting period, you still do not achieve your objectives, question yourself! The choice of your CRM and/or the supervision of your project may not suit you!
2 – Your employees do not use your CRM
For a CRM to be used to its maximum capacity, it is necessary that the majority of employees use it. But its adoption is not guaranteed! Indeed, from the beginning of the project, you must have trained and supported them so that they integrate this new tool into their daily lives. However, after a suitable adaptation period, your teams should be able to use the CRM and take advantage of it as much as possible. If this is not the case, perhaps the tool does not suit them and/or does not exactly meet their needs. Perhaps also your data is not of good enough quality to be fully exploited. In this case, your employees do not see the point of using the CRM. Which is very problematic. So do not hesitate to ask them for their opinion and adapt accordingly.
3 – Your CRM is not connected to your other tools
Marketing Automation, ERP, E-commerce or even BI, you have many tools to manage your business and your teams but you are unable to exploit their full potential. The cause? The constant back and forth between the different solutions that make you lose time and concentration! To stop juggling, your CRM can be very useful and centralize all of your tools on a single platform. Guaranteed time saving and productivity! Your CRM doesn't allow you to do this? It's time to think about changing it! This step is essential for both the experience you deliver to your teams and also to your customers.
4 – The mobile version of your CRM is not optimal
Your CRM is well established, meets (almost) all your expectations and has been adopted by your teams! What more could you ask for? For it to be easily accessible on mobile. Today, your teams, especially sales teams, must be able to access it from anywhere, in the best conditions. Its use on mobile must therefore be optimal to guarantee team productivity and adoption of the tool. If the mobile version of your CRM does not exist, if it is too different from the web version or too complex to use, you risk missing out on many opportunities.
5 – Your CRM is not scalable
Until now, your CRM met your expectations, but this is less and less the case. Your needs are changing (processes, size of the company, activity, functionalities, etc.) and you would like to adapt your tool. This is completely normal! At the beginning of your project, you built it so that it would respond to specific issues that may change. To do this, you should be able to develop its configuration functions and/or call on a competent partner to support you or do it for you. Without this, you risk quickly, and increasingly, being limited and frustrated in its use.
6 – Your CRM is not GDPR compliant and/or its security level is low
There is an obligation that companies must comply with since 2018: compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The latter guarantees respect for users' privacy and the proper use of their data. Companies must therefore ensure that all actions they undertake comply with it. And CRM greatly facilitates this compliance. It guarantees adequate data collection and processing and supervises their use. But if yours does not address this issue, find out how to adapt it... or change it! Also take the opportunity to question yourself about the level of security of your CRM. Is your data protected? Do you know where it is hosted? Are you safe from a breach? If you have doubts, take action!
7 – Your data is not fully exploitable
The basis of your CRM? The data that it aggregates, organizes and restores. To exploit it properly, you must be able to analyze it. And your CRM must support you in this exploration work thanks to relevant analysis and data visualization functionalities or at least, by allowing an interface with a Business Intelligence platform. If this is not the case, you will not be able to fully benefit from your data.
8 – You don’t get along with your integrator
The importance of choosing the partner is decisive in setting up a CRM. They will gather your needs, guide you, frame your project, advise you, and support you in implementing this strategic project. From the start, you must therefore choose them carefully to ensure the success of your project. Despite everything, it may be that after several months or years, this partner no longer corresponds to what you expect from an integrator. If the end of your contract is approaching, take the time to think about what comes next to define what would suit you best and, possibly, turn to another service provider.
9 – Setting up your CRM project never ends
It's been several months now since you started your CRM project! That you contacted an integrator, targeted your issues, determined the ways to address them, chose the functionalities of your tool... But your CRM is not yet in place despite a schedule set up in advance. This may be a problem with the internal organization of the project, its methodology or the scope defined during V1. Ask yourself the right questions to rectify this delay and achieve the success of your project.
A CRM is supposed to allow you to improve the performance of your company and your teams, and to deliver a better customer experience. Obviously, during the project and even after, hazards and unforeseen events can disrupt its implementation and operation. By showing patience and adaptability, the tool will eventually respond, completely or partially, to the problems initially raised. However, beyond a certain tolerance threshold, it is legitimate to question the choice of tool and integrator and to consider changing them.
And fortunately, a CRM project in difficulty can largely be brought back on track. As soon as the problems that are holding back its operation are identified, the necessary actions must be put in place to eliminate these difficulties. Data can be migrated, the organization and use of CRM can be rethought, the bases can be redefined. But for that, you need good support!
It's your turn!
The time for action has come!
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