6 Guiding Principle of CRM Implementation Success

            

Top Guiding Principle for successful CRM Implementation

These 6 Guiding Principles of CRM will guide you through insights to help you to have a more focused view of your customer-centric business. The below guide will walk you through how to weigh and consider your CRM options, solving questions such as:

• How can CRM deliver quantifiable business outcomes?
• How can CRM work with your Company's unique business methods?
• What CRM offers will help you keep ahead and make quick changes in your business and market?
• How can CRM approach customer-facing processes unique to your industry?
• Are there CRM implementation strategies that mitigate the expense and risk for your business?

These six principles will help you develop a CRM strategy that is measurable, executable, and aligned with your Company's long-term strategic goals.

CRM in management:

No company can service without their customers. The way a company manages its customers and customer database determine its business success. CRM helps to improve their core business processes – managing contact information and streamlining their relations with customers. CRM helps sales rep to a built relationship with their customers, creating loyalty and customer retention. CRM is not only a tool but a management strategy that results in increased profits for your business.

Also Read: Lead Conversion in Salesforce – Leads, Contacts, Accounts, and salesforce opportunity | Opportunity in salesforce

What is the correct guiding principle of CRM?

Following are the correct guiding principle of CRM. There are six guiding principles that an organization should 

consider before starting the project.

The principles of CRM:

• Implement with a strategy and not consider as a tool

Before any Company even considers assembling lists of requirements or evaluating available solutions, it should take the time and effort to articulate its CRM strategy and goals clearly. Developing a CRM strategy is one of the most challenging building blocks of CRM success because it cannot merely be based on a simple set of rules or mirror another company's strategy.

• Should fulfill the business needs of both today and tomorrow

Customer-centric CRM strategies effectively manage the customer life cycle from selection and acquisition through retention and cross-sell." It takes its direction from its business goals and aligns those goals with its customer-facing channels and processes.

• Flexible to adapt to changing processes

The customer-centric companies achieving the most remarkable success today use flexible customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to manage their business's customer-facing processes and implement their customer-centric vision. Business processes, however, are not static. A company's ability to reconfigure processes quickly to changing needs, priorities and external factors can produce a significant competitive advantage.

• Define measurable CRM benefit

Most organizations must desire and need to measure the success of their CRM implementation at all levels. Goals and metrics must be well quantified and must be benchmarked right from the start to ensure that the right data is captured and processes put in place to quantify results down the line properly. 

Your Organization must establish Baseline key business measures to determine the impact of CRM on your Organization. It is a starting point that can be compared against once the solution is in place. This comparison also helps ensure that benefits are correctly attributed to changes effected by the CRM system. For example, increased customer satisfaction score, Increase in cross-selling, cost reductions, or changes in the first-call resolution in the analysis for a project.

• The cost of a project should be defined

CRM is not a one-time cost. It's essential to understand the full costs of CRM implementation to help plan, budget, and select systems appropriately. Enterprise application software is costly for most businesses, and expenditures are "upfront" in license fees, services, and training.

The up-front costs of CRM project implementation have driven the popularity of on-demand and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models for CRM, which are often priced on a per-user monthly fee basis. While less prohibitive upfront, research has shown that these solutions can prove more expensive than on-premise solutions over time.

Only on-premise CRM software offers the confidence, flexibility, and control they need for many enterprise customers. Thus, instead of eliminating up-front investments, most companies look at ways to minimize the total cost of ownership over time.

Also Read:  CRM Implementation Methodology?

• Choosing the right partner is essential

All must consider that Implementing and supporting a CRM system is an important and sizeable project. The success factors extend beyond the system itself to the CRM company you partner with and the kinds of supporting services they offer.

Here it's essential to think about your post-implementation needs as well. —find out whether the CRM vendors you are considering offer remote system management services, which can help keep your specialized staffing costs down. 

Having a good sense of your internal resources and capabilities will help ensure that you can leverage the right internal resources while also taking advantage of specialized resources and skill-sets from your CRM vendor or service provider.

Also, check out CRM Methodology for more details on the implementation methods and processes.