Customer Relationship Management Software, or CRM as it’s more commonly known, is a program designed to help companies manage their interactions with both current and potential customers. The software is designed to help companies work more effectively – streamlining the sales and marketing processes – and increase profits.
A CRM dashboard will often show a customer’s past interactions, experiences and any outstanding service issues with your business, helping you to communicate more effectively and personally with them. They sound great on paper and are widely used among marketing and sales teams.
However they’re also one of the main types of business application to fail, with around 30-50% of CRM deployments thought not to achieve the objectives they were set up for. This can be for a whole host of reasons, but here are a few of the top ones:
1. They take too much time to use
CRM software is designed to put all the information you’ll need about a customer at your fingertips…but there’s a hitch. The information is about your customers, so somewhere down the line one of your sales team has to sit and input it all. In many CRM programs, the process of doing this is long, arduous and counter-intuitive.
2. They get filled with inaccurate data
As above, many sales reps feel that they spend way too long inputting data. The fix for some is to put in the most easily accessible information, which might not be the information you’re looking for. Generic company emails and phone numbers get typed in rather than the individual and direct line numbers you really want. Some sales reps in sheer frustration even leave the customer out of the CRM altogether so they can get on with selling.
3. They’re not focussed enough
Many versions of CRM software are designed as an ‘all-in-one’ sales solution for businesses. As such, they’re often not focussed closely enough on the company’s needs and processes – either down to the software itself being too generic, or it not being set up well enough to match what a company needs. A 2013 Experian survey found that up to 25 percent of CRM data is irrelevant, causing issues both with data input time and companies basing a forecast on poor or inaccurate data.
Thankfully, there are plenty of services, programs and tactics around which can help companies more effectively manage their customer relations. Visit You Don’t Need a CRM for guidance on ways to alter your relationship management and make your company’s sales processes more effective.
