These steps are ideal to help you to focus on the problems you are looking to solve and the goals you have. Combining these activities with some objective data will give you an edge to finding the right CRM for your organization. 

Research commissioned on CRM selection

Insightly recently partnered with Ascend2, a B2B research firm, to get insights into how people make this important decision and ways to help them make it a successful one. The report, Choosing the Right CRM to Align Teams: An inside look at how sales, marketing & customer service teams are leveraging their CRM for a better customer experience, is now available for download and review.

The new data reveals how more than 500 sales, marketing and customer service professionals choose a CRM and how they are leveraging their CRM to ensure a best-in-class experience for their customers. 

The report indicates that a customer relationship management (CRM) system can provide businesses of all sizes and industries a host of benefits, and that these systems can be a catalyst for achieving the goals of individual departments and the organization as a whole. 

Finding: CRM is key for delivering exceptional customer experiences

Among the benefits of effectively using a CRM is delivering exceptional customer experiences.

That bodes well for those seeking a CRM since improving the customer experience is a top strategic priority in the year ahead for 55 percent of respondents, second only to growing revenue. 

Further research found that less than one in five respondents rated their organization’s customer experience as exceptional, which is important to note because companies that report the best customer experiences are 2.5 times more likely to report significant revenue growth than all others.

Changing your CRM is common

The study also found that over one-third of organizations will be shopping for a new CRM in the coming year and 45 percent of respondents listed improving customer experience as a top priority in driving the consideration of a new CRM. And for those who currently use a CRM platform and are looking for a change? For those in a manager or director role, the biggest complaints about current platforms being used are missing or inadequate features, cost and difficulty of customization. VPs and executives were more concerned about scalability and costs.

Alignment drives growth

Only one-in-five organizations surveyed report having aligned technology and customer data used by marketing, sales, and customer support/success teams. On the flipside, over one-third of companies with completely aligned technology and customer data across their marketing, sales, and customer success teams saw a significant increase in revenue last year. It’s clear that alignment among teams drives growth.

Benefits of an effective CRM

The top benefits of effectively utilizing a CRM according to those who are extremely satisfied with their solution, include better customer data (44 percent), more organized/streamlined processes (43 percent) and higher sales/faster growth (40 percent).

Across all teams, dashboard visualization of reporting and analytics is essential. Creating a unified view of the customer is imperative to providing an exceptional customer experience.

Over two-thirds (68%) of those surveyed report having customer data stored in multiple locations. Storing customer data across several different platforms limits access across teams and ultimately results in an uninformed and disjointed journey.

A 360-degree unified customer view often includes the following data: 

• CRM and customer data
• Behavioral data
• Marketing channel interactions
• Sales representatives’ interactions
• Support tickets
•  Project status

By enabling this unified customer view, organizations are given a better understanding of the customer. This allows for improved personalization and a better overall customer experience, not to mention more efficient workflows and processes.

The problem with enterprise CRMs 

The data shows that ‘over-buying’ is a real issue in regards to enterprise solutions. It seems that flashy marketing campaigns and big name sponsorships may convince organizations to over-invest in an enterprise solution (e.g. Salesforce) that is really meant for the Fortune 500. Two-thirds of enterprise CRM users are from departments with 50 employees or less. This signals that these organizations have likely over-invested in a solution they likely underutilize. 

The resulting data shows that enterprise CRM users are significantly more likely to complain about initial and ongoing cost of their CRM (41% of Enterprise CRM users list this as a top complaint vs 24% of all others). Clearly, the chosen solution is not a fit.

Integrating with existing systems 

For 40% of those surveyed, integrating a new CRM into existing systems is a major challenge during the implementation process. A CRM that can speak to the rest of your technology stack ensures data accessibility throughout your organization and enable a unified view of the customer.

The most useful integrations according to those surveyed are QuickBooks, ADP, and WordPress, but this varies by who you ask. Sales puts Zoominfo among the top of this list while Customer Success and Ops professionals place a higher value on Workday.

For 40 percent of those surveyed, integrating a new CRM into existing systems is a major challenge during the implementation process. A CRM that can speak to the rest of your technology stack ensures data accessibility throughout your organization and enables a unified view of the customer. 

Project management and CRM is a logical progression

It seems like a natural progression that a prospect becomes a lead, a lead becomes an opportunity, and an opportunity becomes a customer. After that, most CRMs end and projects are moved to a PM tool for execution. A full 93% of those surveyed would adopt a project management tool that was native to their CRM tool to have this continuity rather than exporting data to yet another system. Note: Modern CRMs, like Insightly, have project management functionality built right in.

Failed implementations are costly – in many ways

With any new tool in your organization, the risk of failure is there. Successful adoption is the goal of course, but it doesn’t just happen. Having a plan and a team to guide the process is vital. Failed implementation of a CRM can cost organizations greatly. According to the survey, not overcoming these challenges results in employee frustration, wasted staff time, and missed opportunities for revenue according to 51%, 44%, and 43% of those surveyed respectively. 

In short, every implementation is important, but this is one you have to get right. Steal this proven process from the Insightly implementation experts. 

Methodology, get the full report & more

A custom online questionnaire for the “Choosing the Right CRM to Align Teams” survey was fielded throughout the month of April, 2022 to a panel of 511 professionals representing sales, marketing, customer success, and related operations teams and who self-identified as management through higher-level job functions such as directors, VPs, and executive roles. These individuals represent business-to-business (B2B) organizations in the US with 50 – 500 employees across several industries.

Get your copy of the full report and/or watch a webinar presentation of the results from the head researcher. 

Ready to align your teams? Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo.

The post New research to help companies choose a CRM appeared first on Insightly.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementation is an essential ingredient for a successful CRM project. Our team has helped more than 25,000 businesses successfully implement their CRM system to meet their unique business needs, and we’ve done so with companies of all sizes, across many industries. 

Here is the CRM implementation process developed over years of onboarding new customers. Read on and see how you can optimize it for the best CRM rollout at your company.

Why you need a CRM Implementation Plan

Up to 69% of CRM projects fail because of poor implementation. If done incorrectly, your users will be frustrated or worse. A poor experience could lead to lost customer trust and even lost revenue as customers move away from your business solutions. 

A successful implementation of your CRM makes all the difference in user adoption, customer data integrity, and, ultimately, ROI and your bottom line. It ensures your team will be productive and happy with your system. It also ensures your new CRM software will have enhanced functionality and contribute to customer retention. 

13 Steps To Successful CRM Software Implementation

Whether you run a small business, are heading a start-up, or planning a new CRM system for a large company, your CRM implementation strategy matters. 

Not only will it streamline your sales process and make life easier for different end-users on your team (especially your sales reps), but the right CRM will improve customer satisfaction and enhance workflow for salespeople and managers alike. 

Despite the compelling reasons to switch, organizations continually find themselves settling for what’s familiar. The simple truth is that CRMs can feel risky and costly at first glance – which means staying put feels like a safer choice than taking this leap into uncertainty. 

Here are the 10 steps Insightly takes with every client to maintain our unbeatable customer satisfaction track record. 

1. Gather Your CRM Implementation Team

Before starting the process, you’ll need two key elements to build your team: a CRM owner or sponsor and a CRM implementation team that includes cross-functional specialists and advocates. 

Choose an owner

By choosing an owner, you not only gain a crucial resource to help communicate business needs throughout the organization, but you also get someone committed to its success. Shared ownership for multifaceted CRM implementations can result in no ownership at all, leading to poor and ineffective implementations.

Structure your team

Below is a typical CRM implementation team with cross-functional specialists and advocates.

• Owner: This person will guide and offer organizational perspective and own its success.
• Project Manager: This person will act as the leader throughout the CRM planning process. 
• Application Developer: Their role will be to oversee system customization. 
• Application Analyst: Responsibilities include data cleansing and migration. 
• QA Test Engineer: This person will lead testing efforts. 

Involve stakeholders and future users

Additionally, you’ll need to gather a sampling of representatives from all essential user groups to ensure everyone’s voice is heard. 

• Sales Managers
• Sales Team
• Delivery Managers
• Marketing Managers
• Marketing Team 
• Customer Service Reps 
• Project Managers 

As you gather your team, it’s crucial to think about each member’s role within the CRM implementation project. They are there to help your company meet the goals and KPIs set when you decided to choose a CRM system. 

Pick team members who believe in CRM, can get others on board, and will work to make it a success. 

2. Benchmark your current CRM performance

What are you currently using for a CRM or in place of a CRM (e.g. spreadsheets) Take some time to document what is working with your current system and where there are gaps. Many of these may be the exact reason you started looking for a new system. This data will come in handy post-implementation as a way to see if the major pain points were resolved with your new system. 

3. Assess Your Needs And Define Your Goals/KPIs

The next step is to figure out what solutions your CRM technology will offer your company. Identify goals you want to achieve by outlining how you expect your team to use the CRM system. 

After you run a CRM needs assessment, you are ready to set goals. Your goals for the new system need to include tangible, specific results that are measurable by your business performance within a particular time frame. Established goals will help you identify an actionable plan. 

How to define your CRM goals

Take a look at some examples of measurable goals you can use to design your own. 

Consider CRM pricing at this stage since it may expand or contract the providers you can consider. For instance, Salesforce is a high-priced CRM for the Fortune 500. Microsoft Dynamics is as well. Are those in your price range? Likely not. Does your organization have an ERP? Do you have an ecommerce platform? These considerations may limit the pool of CRMs from which your team can choose. A tool like HubSpot may be appealing, but keep in mind that it was a marketing automation platform first, so it’s CRM function isn’t its strength. Plus, it’s on the pricer side as well. Should it be considered?

When you create goals from your company’s unique needs, you will improve your CRM implementation plan by designing the most useful CRM solution. 

4. Collect And Prepare Your Data

Data management is a big headache that is often overlooked during the CRM implementation process. If not done correctly, it can result in higher implementation costs. Manipulating data once it’s been imported is challenging because the new CRM will use it in a new way. With this in mind, you’ll want to strive to get it right the first time.

Collect existing customer data

It’s important to determine ahead of time what customer data needs to be brought over to the new CRM system and where it is currently located. Your team will also need to identify how they will use it in the new CRM. While bringing over everything may sound like a good idea, you don’t want to clog up your new system with non-actionable data. Be selective.

Build your data model

Once you’ve decided what will be migrated, build a model and see how that data maps from your old system to your new system. Take time and put a lot of detail in this step. It will save you many questions down the road.

Choose the right CRM fields

Your team can transfer company, contact, and contract data from your existing business systems by simply using a CSV file generated through a spreadsheet. Ensure that the data goes into the right fields using the model you set up in the previous step. If custom fields are in order, now is a great time to create and populate them.

Most CRMs have a tool that will automate the import process. Since every solution handles data migration differently, you’ll need to evaluate what is required from the get-go. This will depend on your CRM vendor and can impact your implementation costs drastically. Insightly makes it easy to cleanse your data and migrate all of your data. 

5. Setup Your CRM Properly

Your new system is shiny and clean…yay! You’ve determined how to load your data so it’s all in the right place. Now it’s time to think through the administrative functions. Who needs access to what? You want to provide as much information as possible to users without jeopardizing security and opening yourself up to issues with personally identifiable information (PII). Giving someone too much access is typically worse than giving someone not enough access, so err on the side of caution here.

6. Connect Your CRM Integrations

The beauty of CRM integration is that you connect apps you already use into the new technology, allowing your team to access unified data from a singular platform. It saves time and makes your team feel more interconnected. 

You’ll also want to integrate any program known to enhance the customer experience and automate business processes.

Here are some of the most popular integrations: 

• Communication Platforms
• Accounting Packages 
• Social Media Management Tools 
• Lead Generation Programs 
• Email Applications and Automation Programs 
• Analytics Tools 
• Live Chat Programs 
• Project Management Tools 
• Help Desk Applications 

The downside of integrations is that, with some systems, they can be complex and expensive. For example, legacy CRMs like Salesforce typically require you hire an integration partner or use your dedicated Salesforce team to create an integration. Newer, modern CRMs make integrations significantly easier.

Insightly has endless integration possibilities that are low-code/no code via AppConnect. AppConnect offers customized integration that will align all of your teams and processes to eliminate the need for time-consuming manual tasks. This will allow you to close deals at a faster pace. 

7. Import And Verify Your CRM Data

You’re getting closer to success with your new CRM system. You’ve done the prep work above to model out and plan your data migration. You’ve isolated the data that will be brought over. Now, it’s time for one last cleansing session. 

Clean up your CRM data

It’s vital to cleanse your data before transitioning to a CRM platform. You know the types of data you want to bring and the data you want to leave, but within the data you want to bring, you should be critical. Your team should review it to ensure unnecessary data is removed and data that you will transfer is formatted properly. This last cleansing step will ensure your new system is top notch. 

It’s time!  Now it’s time to make the move; it’s time to import it to your new CRM system. 

Once the transition is complete, verify that the data has been imported successfully by testing a few processes against the old system. This will make the rest of the implementation process much smoother since you can identify and fix any issues before you get too far into the project.

8. Test Your CRM Implementation 

As you near the end of your implementation process, you’ll need to test your CRM software to verify it’s fully functional and works according to the requirements of your business needs. 

As you test, you’ll see how each component works, and evaluate customer touch points connected to the CRM to ensure they work properly and will not impede the customer experience. 

Here are the key elements you need to test:

• Contacts: Ensure all data fields assigned are fillable and recognizable. 
• Pipeline Tracking: Check management systems to see if deal columns match the sales process. 
• Automated Tasks: Look to see if triggers for automated tasks work correctly. 
• Email Capture: Email exchanges should be connected to the proper contact, and dual email sync works as it should. 
• Website Forms: Ensure all forms display correctly, all present fields are fillable, and a completed form is routed to the proper channels. 
• Migrated Data: Double check that all imported records match the appropriate fields and no duplicate data exists. 
• Integrations: Review all of your company’s integrated apps to ensure they are correctly connected. 

No matter your level of experience, CRMs are typically simple to set up and maintain. Insightly offers support for all aspects of your new CRM features to ensure a smooth integration. 

9. Onboard And Train Your First CRM Users 

Now that you’ve tested your new CRM and rolled out all components, it’s time to offer CRM training to your first users. While onboarding for all new tech is an important step, the onboarding for a CRM is likely the most critical process your business will face.  If this process doesn’t go well, the CRM will be useless and the implementation will likely fail.

How to onboard your first CRM users

Starting with a beta group is a good approach. Identify this group and put them through your planned onboarding training sessions. Then, sit back and listen. What went well? What areas are they struggling in? What were the common questions? Use this intel to bolster your training program before rolling it out to all teams.

When showing people how the system works, follow a hybried approach: allow them to watch a live demonstration, followed by some hands-on training. 

Be sure to collect your team’s feedback to discover critical insights on improving the system and making it work for your company. This will minimize roadblocks and system issues down the road. 

10. Built the right CRM dashboards and reports

Dashboards are data visualizations used to discover insights and chart progress towards your goals. You want to have your CRM create dashboards and reports to share among your team, with other team members and with leadership for a top-level view of what’s going on in the organization. As users are onboarded, ask them what types of dashboards they need and find valuable. Follow-up to ensure they are being used. For example, a CRM dashboard could include data on new leads, what’s in the pipeline, team KPIs, and recent activities and and upcoming events and activities.

11. Actively Look For Bottlenecks And Improvement Opportunities

Even those most dynamic implementation processes can yield trouble spots and areas that need improvement. This typically happens when users input workloads too quickly for a team to handle. They create costly delays for your company and cause issues with team members who may already be skeptical of the new CRM. 

Common CRM bottlenecks

Where is information being held up? Examine these areas and look for ways to make improvements. For example, there is a bottleneck in the change from lead to opportunity. Do you need to add an additional step or two in that area to clarify and better communicate the state of the lead?

Build a feedback loop with your users

Take the time to keep a close eye on your CRM to identify these bottlenecks in the sales process, as well as areas that you can improve upon. Keep asking users for their input and make improvements that make sense for your unique situation. This could take many forms, like sending an email, hosting a regular meeting, creating a Slack channel for suggestions, and more. 

Iterate often

Re-evaluate requirements and improvements in your CRM. Choose a cadence and stick to it. For instance, you may plan to make changes and updates ones per month, every other month, or every quarter. This lets the team know that you are committed to responding to their needs and that the system is an ever-evolving part of your organization.

12. Scale Your CRM Implementation as You Grow

A successfully implemented CRM solves your immediate needs, but new needs always arise. Therefore, try not to see the implementation as being “done.” Instead, view it as a continuous effort to evolve and align your current state to the ever-changing marketplace. 

Maintain your growth and business goals as the driver for flexible and scalable enhancements. Gather stakeholders and power users often to identify, update, and prioritize your CRM roadmap. By doing this, administrators can ensure an implementation grows to meet any needs or challenges as they evolve. 

Scale Your CRM Implementation

The scalability of your CRM determines how easily it will be to use your CRM software with a much larger or smaller group of users and locations. 

The chances are that you onboarded critical members of your company whose buy-in you needed to make the CRM a success. Now it’s time to scale your CRM software for the entire team. 

Regular meetings can help your team scale CRM implementations. These meetings allow teams to prioritize features so system administrators can make changes in real-time. This approach offers flexibility and scalability for your team.

13. Measure User Adoption And Implementation Success

You’ll need a customized dashboard that pulls out critical data to target and track consistently to best measure implementation success. 

Pay close attention to critical metrics and whether or not your CRM is meeting the goals you initially set at the start of the implementation process. Here are some key metrics Insightly uses to evaluate the success of our CRM implementation projects. 

Quality of Inputs: An audit to assess whether the quality of all system inputs will be beneficial. It’s best to check inputs that have the most significant possible quality variable. 

• Business Metrics: It’s a good idea to look at broad business metrics and see if you can find connections to your new CRM software. 
• Record Updates: Check to see if users engaging with the CRM are updating records as expected. 
• System Activity: Review the number of actions completed by a specific user in the system. This high-level check will see which users are logging in and actively engaging with the system. 

By evaluating user engagement and the overall implementation process, you can be more confident that the new CRM adds value to your company. 

CRM Implementations Made Easier with Insightly

Implementing CRMs are not simple one-and-done initiatives. While most CRM systems can technically work as purchased, to maximize your investment, you need to make sure that the implementation, configuration, and Go Live phases have all been properly planned and deployed.  

The experts at Insightly are highly trained in integrating, testing, customizing, training, and gathering feedback on your CRM solution. They take the guesswork out of CRM implementation and free up your valuable time to focus on other business processes that need your attention. 

Test out the Insightly CRM free of charge with a free trial. Sign up today to see all the great features!

FAQs

How long does the CRM implementation process take?

The timeline varies depending on unique business and technology needs, though with Insightly CRM customers can begin to become productive and see benefits within 35-45 days. Whereas platform implementations take between 60-90 days. However, depending on the complexity and number of integrations needed, or the platform’s flexibility, the CRM implementation process can take several months.

Does my business need CRM and marketing automation? 

Yes, your business needs both CRM and marketing automation to effectively engage customers at all steps of their journey. Insightly Marketing is native to the CRM platform and enables your marketing and sales team to leverage the same view of customers and provide the best experience for customers.

The post CRM Implementation: Steal this proven process appeared first on Insightly.

TrustRadius announced today that Insightly received a 2022 Most Loved Award. 

How are the awards determined?

TrustRadius analyzed every review collected in 2021 word by word across 25,820 products and 800 categories. The most beloved products were determined by comparing mentions of “love” in all its (grammatical) forms to the total number of reviews received for each product. 

Just 101 products emerged from this process as the winners of TrustRadius’ 2022 Most Loved Award. These products earned the highest ratio of “love” per review across the entire TrustRadius platform.

“Buyers have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to customer relationship management (CRM) software,” said Megan Headley, VP of Research at TrustRadius. “The right CRM can help businesses ensure they are able to provide a seamless customer experience. Insightly earned a Most Loved award based directly on feedback from their customers. It’s one of the most loved software products of 2022.”

We’re blushing, but it got us wondering, what main qualities make a CRM worthy of love? 

• Unification – Perhaps CRM love means you are using a unified platform where marketing, sales, customer service, and project management all come together with a shared database.
• Connections – Being able to integrate with all of the tools you already use, like Quickbooks, WordPress, Slack, and more without writing lines and lines of code could be the definition of CRM love.
• Service – Nothing feels more lonely than not having the support you need. Maybe a loveable CRM is one that provides extensive onboarding, ongoing email and phone support, and quarterly check-ins to make sure you’re getting the most from your CRM by using all of the newest and best features.

So, we hit the proverbial streets to hear directly from Insightly users on what makes them love Insightly. This is what they told us:

Love closing deals faster

“Adopting Insightly has helped us close deals faster because the entire team collaborates on providing mission-critical detail in the CRM. From my perspective as a sales leader, the support I get from the team to capture this information and close opportunities is absolutely critical to our success.” – Ian Pund, Senior Vice President, Sales, Noble Biomaterials

Love driving 10x pipeline

“Insightly Marketing journeys are an intuitive solution that has helped our client drive a 10x increase in pipeline over just a few months by identifying prospects with a high propensity to convert. – Amy Anderson, Co-Founder, Wild Coffee Marketing

Love easy customizations

“With Insightly, we can implement changes in minutes, not months. And as sys admin, I’m able to handle almost any customization–we don’t need to hire expensive dev resources to update code.” – Charlana Tanner, Business Systems Administrator, Sigma Equipment

Love doubling output

“We use projects to manage complex client reporting on campaign performance and audience insights. Insightly’s flexibility and functionality has empowered our teams to double the number of projects we deliver weekly.” – Maud Levasseur, Director, Platform Operations, AdSquare

Love dashboard views

We’re a very data-driven organization.  Adopting dashboards has saved multiple days per month in manual Excel work for me and my dept heads, reduced the possibility of errors, and empowered us to be much more forward-looking in our approach.” – Jonathan Bernwieser, CEO and Co-Founder, Agrando    

Love doubling lead volume

“In less than a year, we’ve expanded our program from 2-3 campaigns a month to 12 unique campaigns, and we’re continuing to grow. Using advanced segmentation has doubled our lead pipeline and deal conversion through more effective targeting.” – Jordan Horn, Email Campaign Marketing Manager, Barrier Companies

Love customizations without a developer

“Insightly empowers our team to easily customize fields, processes and automations on the fly. You don’t need to be a developer to do this–it just works so seamlessly. Insightly helps us deliver a bespoke experience for all of our customers.” – Chris Benham, Director, The Village Goldsmith

Love hitting growth targets

“Insightly Professional Services delivered a business-critical integration that not only gives us real-time access to revenue projections, but is also empowering us with the insights we need to hit our growth targets.” – Andrew Piron, COO, Proud Source Spring Water

Time to swipe right on Insightly

So, if you’ve got the CRM blues, it’s time to swipe right on Insightly. Whether you’re looking for your first CRM love, or you’re moving away from a partner who’s not treating you right, Insightly has the features and the pricing that will make your heart sing and your phones ring. Start a free trial today. 

The post Feeling the love for your CRM? appeared first on Insightly.

A Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is a tool to manage all of your organization’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. CRMs provide a firsthand understanding of your customer’s experience to help you match your products and services to their needs. 

Like any tool, you’ll get the most out of your CRM when you put the most into it. The first step in that effort is to be sure to choose the best CRM based on your needs.

If you’re unfamiliar with the CRM software market, you may feel overwhelmed. In short, it’s huge.You may not know that there are subsets of CRMs, so it’s important to align your business type and objectives with the right offering. Let’s begin with what is generally agreed to be the four classic types of CRM systems.

Type 1: Operational CRMs

Operational CRMs provide customer service or marketing support through automation and streamlining business processes. They capture customer interactions and track lead qualification and action marketing automation.

Operational CRMs collect data from different marketing sources like social media, emails, or website visitors. This data can help your marketing team quickly and easily qualify leads. Operational CRMs also add value by providing more upfront information for analysis. An example of an operational CRM is Spotio.

Type 2: Analytical CRMs

Analytical CRMs use algorithms and machine learning to analyze the data they gather to create optimal customer targeting. Analytical CRMs provide insight into data and then understand and anticipate the customer’s needs that humans would otherwise miss. 

This category of CRM provides higher levels of insight and analysis regarding customer data. In addition, you can customize and scale them to allow your business to add or remove modules to suit your needs. An example of an analytical CRM is OLAP.

Type 3: Collaborative CRMs

Collaborative CRMs are mainly for customer relationship management tracking. These CRM solutions allow you to manage and track interactions with customers who contact your company via resources like social media, emails, and websites. A tracking system can help your team share sales process and task status information, reducing the confusion on what they need to do next. An example of a collaborative CRM is Dynamics 365 Sales.

Type 4: Strategic CRMs

Business models that focus on repeat and loyal customer bases use strategic CRMs to learn more about their customers. They then use this knowledge to build and maintain long-term relationships.  

Like the other types, strategic CRMs collect, analyze, segregate, and apply customer information and market trends to develop better value propositions. The difference is, this type of CRM uses algorithmic and analytical features to focus on building loyalty. It also finds strategic opportunities for engagement consistently and for more extended periods. Most generic CRMs would be identified in this category. 

Legacy CRM: Salesforce

Salesforce is the grandfather of sales CRMs. It is practically a household word these days, but it is also famous for being highly complex and expensive to deploy. 

Salesforce setup is time-consuming. The system’s complexity will require specialized resources that are almost always unavailable internally. Also, it may leave you with limited options. Although Salesforce claims to be integrated, additional apps are more bolt-ons than enhancements. 

Salesforce uses its market dominance to lock you into a single CRM type. A single type of CRM means you will be stuck with a solution that will evolve slowly. That leaves you with a problematic tool to use and constricts you to its technology. 

One of its main drawbacks is its high initial price point and recurring costs. The pricing structure is as confusing as it is costly. Development and user interfaces can be tricky to use. There are steep learning curves and user adoption issues that both admins and end-users need to surpass to get the most out of it. This makes the total cost of ownership very high.

The major advantage to Salesforce is also its major drawback: it’s a popular solution so theoretically you can hire people who already have experience in using it. However, it’s so highly customized by each organization that going from one Salesforce instance to another is akin to starting over. 

Niche player CRM: HubSpot

HubSpot’s primary focus is on marketing and marketing automation; its CRM came later. 

HubSpot is often perceived as a closed system that does best when it is not subject to integrations. As an example, companies with multiple and intricate sales technologies may not find it easy to integrate their complex environment with non-HubSpot technologies. 

A common concern about HubSpot is that it lacks flexibility and robustness when it comes to customizations and sales reporting. When identifying duplicate accounts and contacts, data synchronization is another example of its inflexibility.

Also, keep in mind that if your business or organization is in growth mode, it’s likely that you will outgrow HubSpot at some point. Thus the process of selecting and implementing a new CRM will be on the horizon for you again. 

How to choose the right type of CRM

While classic one-type CRMs noted above perform well within their strength areas, they can get you and your team stuck in a data silo. Whether it’s technological, price, or people-based, sooner or later, you’ll end up with a solution that doesn’t meet your needs. 

Legacy and niche solutions come with their own set of problems, including the risk of difficult user adoption, counter-intuitive UX, costly time, and investment losses due to additional customizations. 

You know you need to choose a CRM that will grow with your business, integrate easily, and not break the bank. It’s time to explore a modern, unified CRM as the answer to this need. 

Why modern unified CRMs are the answer

Modern CRMs save you time and money because they are easy to set up, so you don’t have to engage with expensive integrators to implement your CRM. Implementation is quick, so you won’t need to wait months to experience the benefits of your new system.

The six main reasons to choose a modern unified CRM are as follows: 

1. Improved collaboration and automation – Modern CRMs like Insightly ensure that your sales, marketing, and customer support teams find and work on the information they need. Winning a customer’s business and loyalty takes a united effort, not a siloed one. With modern CRMs, you can give your teams the ability to work in a united and carefully tracked manner due to the enhanced collaboration and automation. 

2. Maximized marketing automation – Most marketing teams juggle multiple tasks and projects at the same time. Marketing automation can allow you to maximize your marketing team’s time and effort. For example, by using Insightly Marketing, your team can create and recreate campaign structures quickly instead of having to reinvent the wheel. In addition, they can rapidly deploy workflow-based processes like web-to-lead forms that automatically generate new records and update data fields to ensure proper categorization. Easy-to-create workflows can trigger drip campaign emails that keep prospects highly engaged. Marketing reporting is easy as well, and is visible to all other teams. 

3. Streamlined sales automation – Unnecessary data entry means sales teams waste time and energy instead of concentrating on deals and the pipeline. Modern CRM sales automation can streamline sales aspects such as lead nurturing and routing. Insightly Sales makes lead-building email outreach campaigns easy for your team to manage. New leads receive emails automatically within moments of requesting information. All additional emails will seamlessly go out throughout the buyer’s journey without creating new manual task bottlenecks that are inefficient and prone to error.

4. Concise customer service automation – Closing new business is the goal, and it’s just the beginning. There’s so much more work to do to communicate the needed handoffs to deliver on promises and serve the customer. It’s vital to get these tasks right so you can retain your newly-won customers. Insightly Service, which is built on the same platform as Insightly CRM and Marketing, includes key features like an easy-to-access blade showing knowledge sidebar, macros, and full history, making it easy to share information and communicate quickly. It also includes quick visibility to SLAs, so reps can stay on track. Convenient dashboards and reports help managers analyze workflows and deploy resources more efficiently.

5. Deeply integrated – Modern CRMs like Insightly are more agile than legacy CRMs because they allow you to quickly build sophisticated integrations with the applications you already use in your organization, like Google, SAP, DocuSign, and much more. Imagine building workflows and integrations without writing a line of code. Insightly’s AppConnect is a no-code solution, so you don’t have to hire developers. AppConnect uses drag and drop functionality, automated error handling, built-in versioning, plus instant deployment and provisioning so your team can build and run sophisticated integrations efficiently.

6. Easy to implement and onboard new people – Legacy CRMs are complex and challenging to implement. They require a deep knowledge of the technology and often require third-party consultants to help, and that’s just with the install. The extreme amounts of documentation and training options demonstrate the complexity in deploying and rolling out to end-users. Modern CRMs like Insightly are built with the user experience in mind. They are designed to be intuitive and to perform like common consumer apps that are already familiar to users. They eliminate the need for long and complex implementations and get your team up and running as quickly as possible so you can experience CRM success in no time.

Where to start?

Not sure where to start? Get your personalized demo of a modern, unified CRM today to see it in action.

The post The 4 types of CRMs and their differences appeared first on Insightly.

A CRM solution is an essential part of your company’s digital transformation. You can eliminate redundant interactions, departmental silos, and customer frustrations. You can maintain all your customer data on one central platform. And you can create new assets like dashboards, visualizations, and apps with incredible speed.

For example, your sales team leads can view individual interaction maps and know exactly where prospects are in your funnel. You can track each prospect’s unique paths through your marketing and sales pipeline.

Most importantly, you can use a CRM to develop and maintain long-lasting customer relationships.

Define your CRM needs

Before committing to a CRM solution, identify the business needs it should address. Determine the aspects of your current sales and marketing system you want to maintain. Next, ask yourself which goals you’d like to accomplish. And finally, answer these critical questions: 

• How do you currently track marketing prospects and sales leads? 
• How do you manage ongoing customer/client relationships?
• Do you use the same CRM software for all front-end operations? 
• What redundancies exist between your current systems? 
• What will it take to switch CRM platforms?
• Which new technologies do you want to leverage? Consider customized dashboards and visualizations, app development and deployment, and AI data analysis, forecasting, and machine learning.

Once you’ve answered these questions, here’s what you need to do next to get started. 

1. Assemble a cross-functional team

Because your CRM software will affect a wide array of stakeholders, you need a cross-functional needs assessment team. This group should represent senior leadership, middle managers, and the front-end staff who will use your new CRM every day. Invite specialists like IT people and CRM admins – as well as generalists and creative thinkers.

Choose a leader for this group who has an excellent understanding of all your customer-facing operations. This person will take responsibility for the project, ensure team member accountability, and deliver a data-backed decision. Consider operations or data managers, sales leaders, or IT leads for this position. Most of all, this person should balance details with general perspectives and have excellent communication skills.

2. Collect feedback from future users

Your new CRM software will integrate all your front-facing operations into one system, so touch base with everyone who will use it. Have leaders ask their teams what functionalities they value in your current system, what customer experiences they wish you could offer, and what workflows and interactions they wish you could track?

Create a comprehensive needs list like this:

• Secure customer data management
• Lead management
• Project management
• Workflow automations, integrations, and customizations
• Sales automations like product and price catalogs, quote books, territory management, etc.
• Marketing automations like campaign management, email marketing, lead scoring, etc.
• Data analytics and reporting
• Mobile CRM access
• Data management during the transition to this new CRM
• User training and ongoing support
• Implementation requirements and total cost of ownership

3. Analyze and synthesize feedback

Meet with a small group of stakeholders and parse your feedback data.  Look for similarities between  ideas, issues, and feature requests that may signal important trends. Group these into categories such as important features, cost and licensing, scalability, integrations, and support.

4. Prioritize your CRM needs and wants

Choose a CRM solution that meets the needs of your customer-facing teams. As you review your analysis, differentiate between each department’s “must-haves” and “wants.” Look beyond the needs of any single group to be sure your new CRM is easy to scale up as your business requirements grow and change.

Assess CRM vendors

To properly assess all the CRM solution vendors available, consider some key questions, including: 

• Which one offers the right mix of features for your organization of all the CRM companies out there?
• Which CRM tool allows access to real-time customer relationship data?
• Which contact management suite tears down the invisible barriers between your marketing, sales, and support teams? 
• Does your CRM software map interactions in real-time so your team members can speak with confidence and relevance? For instance, your sales manager may want to follow up with current customers to track relationships.
• And most importantly, how will your new system protect your customer’s personal information?

5. Identify solutions that fit your needs

Every department will need different features from your CRM. For example, your: 

• Marketing teams may want CRM features like custom dashboards and detailed lead management visualizations. 
• Sales managers may want to know how far prospects have progressed through your sales pipeline. 
• Content creators may require clearer perspectives on the email and workflow builder, and its content creation interface.

By determining all the features your company needs, you can compare CRMs and make the best decision for your company. 

6. Keep an eye out for CRM costs

Big names don’t mean big savings and every feature you require. Some legacy CRMs may include features that don’t meet your business needs. Alternatively, these older CRM solutions may not have the new technologies necessary to increase your market share.

CRM providers typically offer tiered pricing per user that facilitates scaling. However, look out for hidden fees and ensure the features you want are in the tier you choose.

7. Hop on trials and demos

After comparing the benefits of the CRMs on your list, pick two or three to examine in depth. The most efficient way is to schedule live demos and sign up for free trials.

Have your tech team test out integrations, customizations, and add-ons. Ask your marketing team which CRMs provide the conversion statistics they need to get the most from your ad budget. Have sales teams test out custom ticket automations and role-based permissions.

8. Remember these essential CRM characteristics

As you’re testing potential CRM solutions, consider the following essential factors that may matter most for everyday use:

• Implementation—Choose someone who understands team workflows and tech logistics to create a new CRM implementation plan. Although you probably want a CRM software suite with comprehensive functionality across many departments, you also need a CRM system that integrates with your existing software and data.
• Adoption rate—While a CRM software suite with comprehensive functionality across many departments is a wise choice, you also need a CRM system people will actually use. According to this 2019 report, experts differ on the causes of low adoption rates, such as bad experiences, poor onboarding, and negative preconceptions. However, the data shows that users engage more with systems that are easy to use, and include mobile apps.
• Customization and workflows—Even though a particular CRM software package may look like the right one on the surface, be sure to dig deeper, so have your teams test the limits of dashboard customizations, email design tools, and analytics.Make sure your new CRM can handle everything your teams throw at it during their daily workflows. Do a few test runs with salespeople playing the part of customers. That way, you’ll know you’re making the right choice.
• Support—A CRM system is only useful to your organization if users can quickly and easily get the help they need. From salespeople to tech people, everyone eventually needs help. Be sure the CRM you choose provides comprehensive customer service and support.
• Integration: A unified platform—You can save big bucks with a single, unified CRM solution that eliminates redundancies and helps you create efficiencies. However, integrating all your client-facing operations into one system can be difficult. So have your tech teams work closely with team leads to ensure your CRM can deliver on its all-in-one promises long before deployment day.
• Scaling and growth—Your CRM is the central hub of your customer-facing operations. Adopting new CRM software can put a massive strain on your teams. Be sure the platform you choose will easily scale to your growth. That way, you’ll avoid massive headaches by not having to change CRMs every time you expand.
• Smooth transitioning—Your new CRM software should seamlessly integrate with a wide array of third-party applications. Make sure your CRM works well with the tools you use now and the tools you’ll rely on as you scale up.Of course, your CRM will also need to integrate with your existing system. It’s crucial to preserve your current customer relationship data as you transition to a single, unified CRM.
• Compliance—Your organization needs to show it meets all current digital privacy requirements for the countries in which you’ll be operating. Be sure the CRM software you choose has powerful and up-to-date customer information protections. Nothing matters more than building and maintaining customer trust, so your CRM should be able to support those goals.
• Ease of use —Although your team needs to feel comfortable using your new CRM platform, consider how it looks to your customers. Find out if their experience is pleasant? Does your CRM software feel intuitive? Have team members play the role of the customer. They’ll learn a lot about each CRM’s UX by opening emails, clicking through funnels, and filling out forms.

9. Choose the best CRM system

Ultimately, you need to discover what feels right for your workflow and your teams. Take your time, test potential new CRMs, and check in with your colleagues. Together, you’ll find a set of tools that supports all your organization’s front-facing teams.

Marketing, sales, and support teams love a unified CRM

Insightly provides the versatility you need to quickly and easily scale your operations.

With Insightly, integration and dashboard customization are a snap. Our users appreciate our massive suite of relevant and powerful tools. Insightly’s adoption rates are incredibly fast because people enjoy using our tools.

Rely on Insightly for everything from broad-scope analytics to single-customer views. Our CRM software gives you unparalleled perspectives on your most precious asset: customer relationships.

Make us the nerve center of your entire customer service infrastructure. Click here for a free trial of Insightly.

The post 9 steps to choose the best CRM appeared first on Insightly.

A unified CRM is what’s required to thrive in a competitive landscape. The tools and data integration that it provides enable all of the company’s teams to seamlessly achieve synergy. They enable you to gain more insights and deliver a better experience.

Let’s dive deeper into the ways Insightly’s unified CRM software can have a transformative impact on your business.

What is the CRM process?

The CRM process can be best described as a business strategy that enables companies to better identify and interact with current and potential customers. 

The idea here is to improve personalization for every customer interaction for enhanced customer experience and loyalty through data analysis and segmentation tools.

The same approach is also leveraged for prospects to convert them into paying customers. The five core steps of the CRM process signify a collaborative effort between the key departments in a company.

The 5 steps of the CRM cycle

1. Increase brand awareness

Typically the marketing team’s domain, the first step in the customer relationship management process involves introducing prospects to the business. It requires in-depth research on the audience’s demographics and interests.

Audience personas are created based on this market research to launch marketing campaigns that will theoretically have a greater chance of resonating with the audience.

2. Acquire more leads

The lead acquisition step is generally handled by the sales or marketing teams, or in some companies, both. This is essentially an effort to get prospects to engage with the business. 

For example, the marketing team might offer downloadable content as a lead magnet to website visitors if they provide an email address. The sales team could then pull that data from the CRM to proactively target prospects to convert them into customers.

3. Convert leads into paying customers

Reps nurture leads to get them to convert to paying customers in this part of the sales process. They usually rely on lead-scoring data in the CRM to identify prospects that may have the highest probability of a sale and follow-up diligently with the lead.

Converting prospects into new customers is more of an art than a science. Sales reps must be skilled at building trust to inspire confidence in the leads to convert them into paying customers.

4. Retain customers with customer support and customer success

The job doesn’t end when the lead converts into a customer. Providing them with exceptional customer service is key to ensuring that they remain loyal customers.

The most widely used metric in customer service is CSAT or customer satisfaction. This data is used to track trends and identify and fix any issues impacting customer service.

5. Extract more value per customer with upsells/cross-sells

Upselling and cross-selling are great opportunities to proactively meet the needs of your customers by utilizing the data in the CRM. Companies should be mindful of the fact that customers’ needs may change over time. 

This can be achieved by leveraging purchase data to provide personalized recommendations on the products and services that would provide further benefit to the customers.

Why the CRM process is flawed

Not all companies are created equal. The customer journey will always be different for every company. What works for one may not necessarily work for the other. This crucial fact tends to be overlooked by the CRM process. 

What ends up happening is that the data gets compartmentalized in different tools. It turns into a mess as data discrepancies inevitably occur when all teams are not entering data into the same system.

This causes friction between various teams, including sales and marketing, since they effectively work in silos with complex ad hoc data sync processes.

Employees thus end up not trusting the data as it doesn’t provide them with a holistic view to make empowered decisions. They come to question the integrity of the data because it doesn’t appear to be cohesive and comprehensive.

They also find it difficult to achieve synergy with colleagues on other teams. Alignment across teams is crucial to close more customers and to improve retention.

A real-life CRM process example

A legacy CRM is effectively used as a suite of apps by a company. All of the sales, marketing, and service data is collected and managed in separate silos. 

Thus, in reality, these so-called “integrated” CRMs are actually “assembled” CRM software where features and functionality were added over time in response to customers’ needs. 

These solutions don’t fit the customer journey, particularly for companies that offer multiple products and services. The many teams that work on them use different tools that all do the same thing but don’t allow for seamless data integration. It’s impossible to have confidence in the data when it’s scattered everywhere. 

There’s no continuity between the various tools in the CRM system, which prevents them from having an up-to-date and comprehensive view of the customer journey.

This will prevent, for example, the hardware and software sales teams in a company from leveraging the upsell/cross-sell opportunities that may exist with their customers simply because their data is all over the place. 

Trying to fully integrate the scattered data is an expensive and time-consuming proposition, often making efforts to achieve that futile.

A better, adaptive approach to the CRM process

1. Start with the customer journey

The customer journey is a vital part of any CRM integration. Most solutions go about it the wrong way by forcing the customer journey to adapt to the CRM process. 

Think about it, what works for a customer who wants to buy hardware might not work for someone who’s buying software. The same CRM strategy can’t be used for both.

It should be the other way around. The CRM process needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the customer journey. This increases the potential of converting leads and enhancing retention regardless of what stage of the sales pipeline they’re in.

2. Integrate with your existing tools

A single customer view that centralizes all customer data is a powerful tool to achieve synergy. Its integration with all of the existing tools that a business uses is also of vital importance. 

Insightly AppConnect is a tool that allows for integration automation. Companies can use it to link and integrate Insightly’s unified CRM system with the other apps they use in their organization. 

This allows for powerful new workflow automation between applications. AppConnect also features over 500 pre-built connections to popular business apps.

Even non-technical users can build seamless integrations by using its simple drag and drop interface without writing a single line of code.

3. Take a unified approach

Companies can both extract the most from their CRM implementation and improve customer service by adopting a unified approach that no longer relies on redundant tools and the compartmentalization of data in silos. 

They can achieve synergy and data integration by unifying the marketing, sales, support, and project management on a single platform. All of the teams work together with a holistic view of the customers’ needs and expectations.

​​One of the biggest benefits of a unified solution for teams is that they can complete many tasks in one single system. They no longer have to switch between multiple applications to use various tools just to access data, a task that unnecessarily slows them down. 

Insightly puts this unified approach at the heart of its CRM solution. Teams’ productivity increases through automation. With business intelligence built in, Insightly can also be used to create data visualizations and real-time data dashboards for unmatched visibility.

Insightly unifies your CRM process

Insightly empowers organizations and even small businesses to align sales, marketing, and support teams so that they have complete visibility over customer relationships. They can use that insight and knowledge to improve customer service. 

Automatic lead routing ensures that leads are routed to the right person in real-time. With workflow automation, companies can create complex, multi-step business processes to better serve their customers. It can even execute custom business logic to sync with external systems from the likes of SAP and Oracle.

AppConnect ensures that the ecosystem of tools that a company uses every day isn’t disrupted; rather it’s integrated seamlessly with the CRM. AppConnect comes with more than 500 pre-built connections to the most popular business software apps. This makes establishing seamless integrations between the CRM and apps very straightforward.

Interested in learning more about how a real single customer view can enable you to improve customer retention and to better connect with them? Try Insightly for free to feel the unified CRM difference for yourself.

The post The CRM process is flawed. Here is why. appeared first on Insightly.

Many companies talk about being “customer-centric.” In reality, too few invest the time and effort to provide truly customer-centric experiences.

How can you push your organization to become more customer-centric?

Recently, I sat down with Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly, to discuss best practices for enabling customer-centric experiences. Here are four important tips to consider.

1. Align around providing the best possible customer experience

Modern buying cycles are complex. Gone are the days of exclusively relying on sales to handle every customer interaction. Marketing, customer success and support, product development, finance, and a myriad of other stakeholders play important roles in the customer experience.

Before you can align your teams and individual contributors around an ideal experience, you need alignment at the top. “Being customer-centric requires alignment among all of a company’s executives and agreement to focus on the best possible customer experience,” says Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly. “From marketing to selling to supporting customers with great products and services, leaders must consciously seek new ways to improve.”

Open and honest communication is the best way to cultivate alignment among leaders. Start an internal conversation and begin collecting opportunities for improvement. Explore how your company can maximize value across every stage of the customer experience—and with the highest level of satisfaction. Which parts of the customer experience are contributing to (or eroding) satisfaction?

Tip: Frontline staff, who regularly interact with your customers, can be an excellent source of ideas. Find ways to include them in the conversation, too!

2. Define your ideal customer journey

Once leadership agrees that the customer experience is a top priority, it’s time to develop a shared vision of the ideal pre-sale and post-sale experience. “Leaders need to gain a clear understanding of a customer’s desired outcome,” says Luke. “It’s about knowing where customers are today, why they arrived at your solution, and the resources they’re willing to spend to achieve their goals.”

Journey mapping is one approach for obtaining a shared vision of the customer experience. As pointed out in 3 ways to use CRM data in building customer journeys, mapping your current journeys involves three basic steps:

Define your ICPs and personas. Gain a clear understanding of the types of companies and people you serve. What do they have in common? Organizing customers by ICP (ideal customer profile) and persona will make it easier to think in terms of an “ideal” experience.

Gather data to identify similar journeys. How do your ICPs and personas advance through the customer journey? Do they go through common steps when purchasing or renewing? Use data from your CRM or other business systems to avoid flawed assumptions.

Build your customer journey map. Your journey map could be a simple spreadsheet or a complex diagram. Either way, the end product should be backed by real-world data and easily accessible by leadership. Which parts of the journey are less than ideal for the customer? What steps can be taken to provide a more customer-centric experience?

Frequently reevaluating your journeys through the eyes of the customer will help you close the gap between the status quo and the ideal. And, according to Luke, it’s also an activity that can have a measurable impact on your bottom line. “If you provide the best experience possible, customers are more likely to stay,” says Luke. “So, if you’re looking to grow, you should be customer-focused through the entire journey.”

3. Get the right data, metrics, and tools

How do you know if you’re providing a customer-centric experience? Collecting the right data and monitoring the right metrics is key for establishing a baseline and tracking progress. Which data and metrics are most important? The answer may vary from company to company, but here are a few to consider:

CSAT is the measurement of a customer’s satisfaction with a particular interaction. A sustained uptick in aggregated CSAT can mean that customers are generally happier with their experiences.

Contraction, or churn, measures the number of customers who take their business elsewhere during a period of time. Negative experiences lead to elevated levels of contraction, while positive experiences reduce churn. So, it stands to reason that lower contraction indicates an improvement in the customer experience.

Average time spent per support ticket measures how long agents take to resolve customer issues. Customers prefer shorter wait times to longer ones, so reducing time per ticket is bound to make customers happier in the long run.

Aligning all of your customer interactions—across sales, support, and marketing—into one system like Insightly can make it easier to track and report on key metrics. Eliminating data silos reduces complexity and makes it easier to develop a comprehensive view of the customer experience.

4. Establish an effective feedback loop

Internal data and metrics are no substitute for direct customer feedback. Unfortunately, many companies struggle to implement a scalable feedback loop. “Effective companies do more than ask for feedback,” says Luke. “They use feedback to initiate meaningful internal discussions and ultimately communicate it back to their customer base.”

For example, Insightly’s founder and CEO, Anthony Smith, regularly hosts product release webinars to share the company’s latest innovations—innovations that stem largely from customer feedback. These webinars not only serve as an effective vehicle for feature announcements, but they also help customers feel more connected—and committed—to the Insightly experience. “Celebrating victories is huge because people want to feel like they’re being heard,” says Luke. “Forming an emotional connection further solidifies the customer’s connection to the company.”

Time for a customer-centric approach?

Customers have never had more choices at their disposal. In an increasingly commoditized marketplace, the companies that deliver the best experiences will win.

Stay tuned for additional customer service tips. Next time, we’ll explore the relationship between customer success and the customer experience.

The post 4 tips for creating a customer-centric experience appeared first on Insightly.

This is part 2 of a customer service blog series based on conversations with members of Insightly’s client services and customer success teams.

In part 1 of this customer service blog series, we discussed five important skills for building great relationships. Continuing on with my discussion with Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly, today we’ll discuss a few challenging situations in customer service—and how agents can apply their skills to overcome them.

1. Getting to the root of the problem

“It just doesn’t work.”

If you’ve spent any time in customer service, you’ve probably heard customers make general statements like this. Deciphering what the customer actually means can sometimes be more challenging than fixing the problem at hand. Is your product or service actually broken, or does the customer simply not understand how to make something work? Is this a support issue, or does it have more to do with training?

The customer’s level of technical expertise is a key factor to keep in mind when trying to get to the root of the problem. “You have to be very careful with word choice, especially if you’re working with someone who isn’t tech-savvy or familiar with your product,” says Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly. Newbies aren’t the only ones who can cause challenging situations for customer service agents. “On the flip side, you also have to be ready to help that super-technical customer, too,” says Zeke.

Try this: Avoid jumping straight into the weeds and making incorrect assumptions. According to Silva, a better approach starts with asking general questions. “You have to treat it like a funnel and slowly—or quickly—work towards more pointed questions,” says Zeke.

2. Dealing with seasonal fluctuations and other growing pains

Answering dozens of similar support tickets can lead to a numbing effect that quickly erodes an agent’s ability to empathize with customers. That’s especially true when your company experiences a period of rapid hypergrowth or a seasonal uptick in demand. Focusing too much on average handle time, time to resolution, and other performance metrics at the expense of the customer journey will only compound the problem.

Experienced customer service teams seek a balanced approach that focuses on efficiency and effectiveness without losing touch of the bigger picture. For Insightly’s support team, this means reminding agents that each new quarter is an opportunity to serve an entirely new batch of customers—many of whom may have similar questions. “Having agents ready for that prepares them to be in the right mindset for responding appropriately,” says Zeke. “Preparing the team for an influx enables them to offer a great experience, especially for brand new customers who may be switching from a competitor.”

Try this: Re-examine your company’s revenue patterns and identify periods that tend to yield large influxes of new customers or support requests. Proactively communicate this to your customer service team and make sure they’re amped up to handle the surge.

3. Advocating for the customer when things break

Not every customer service issue can be resolved with a simple email, phone call, or screen share. Sometimes things break and require a considerable amount of effort to identify, replicate, capture, and fix the underlying problem.

Training front-line support staff to diagnose and escalate tickets is the first step. However, escalating a ticket will do no good unless there is a reliable infrastructure in place to deal with bugs and other unexpected problems. “You don’t just throw a baseball at someone and hope they’re ready to catch it,” says Zeke. “They’ve got to be ready to receive it, and the same is true for dealing with escalated tickets.”

Solving complex problems may require input from multiple stakeholders across customer service, operations, engineering, and other teams. And, that’s no small task in a business environment that’s still dominated by remote work. It’s difficult to be an effective advocate for the customer when information is spread across multiple inboxes, threads, and systems. That’s why having all of your essential customer data in one, easily accessible location is particularly important.

Try this: Audit your existing ticket escalation workflow and look for ways to improve it. Where does information tend to get lost or overlooked? How does communication break down across departments? How can you consolidate overlapping systems and make it easier to advocate for your customers?

4. Holding other teams accountable

Streamlining ticket escalations, reducing overlapping systems, and eliminating data silos is a major step forward, but doing so doesn’t guarantee accountability from the rest of your company. To ensure timely resolution for your customers, it’s best to establish cross-departmental service-level agreements (SLAs) that are backed by leaders from each team.

Tying internal SLAs to customer-facing SLAs is another strategy for creating urgency throughout the organization. For example, Insightly users on the Ultimate success plan can expect to receive a response within one hour of sending an email. “That builds confidence with customers that they’ll get a first touch within a certain amount of time,” says Zeke. Once an issue has been validated, Insightly’s engineering team sequences the work based on previously agreed to SLAs, which gives the support team—and, in turn, the end user—a specific time frame for achieving a satisfactory outcome.

Keeping the lines of communication open is essential for avoiding misunderstandings. Insightly’s support team also sends a bi-weekly email to engineering, which contains additional context for prioritizing customer requests. “We’ve created multiple avenues to prioritize and elevate,” says Zeke.

Try this: Formalize the working relationship between your customer-facing and back-office teams, perhaps through one or more SLAs. Gain buy-in from leaders from across the organization and look for ways to tie agreements back to customer expectations.

Next up, tips for becoming even more customer-centric

Stay tuned for the next article in this series. We’ll be moving beyond customer service issues and focusing our attention on proactive strategies that ensure a customer-centric experience.

The post 4 customer service challenges (and how to solve them) appeared first on Insightly.

Many Americans who have switched to remote work recognize the benefits. There’s zero commute and a comfortable work environment. That being said, remote work comes with its fair share of challenges, especially when it comes to maintaining high levels of communication and productivity.

Both large and small companies are announcing permanent or partial shifts to remote workforces, making the need for best-in-class technology ever so important. Here’s why adopting a unified CRM can be a smart choice for your remote teams.

Remote work challenges

Let’s start by discussing the challenges that many remote teams are struggling to overcome.

Information silos

The transition to cloud-based systems was already underway well before the pandemic. Managing business information in department-specific web applications comes with numerous benefits, but doing so can lead to data silos. One system for deals, another system for marketing campaigns, and still another for delivery makes it difficult to gain a full view of the customer journey and connect data points to accurately measure business performance and ROI.

Poor communication

Virtual meeting fatigue isn’t the only communication-related challenge facing remote teams. When business information is spread across numerous systems, it makes collaboration more difficult for staff. Instead of talking about how to best serve the customer, team members are faced with conversations about how to get data from point A to point B.

Remote selling

Selling while sheltering adds an entirely new level of complexity for your sales reps. Customers want to do business with people that they genuinely like and trust. But how can your company build trust when remote teams are operating in misalignment with sales? If your sales rep is saying one thing but your marketing emails and collateral say another, or the delivery doesn’t match promises made at the time of the sale—your customers will get confused, stop engaging, and lose trust in your company.

Distributed ad budgets

Trade shows, a traditional mainstay of corporate marketing, are still on hold in many industries and geographic locations. For digital marketers, it means more money to allocate toward email campaigns, content marketing, SEO, paid search engine ads, and other online promotions and initiatives. However, managing a dozen different marketing programs requires continuous tracking and performance measurement. Compare this to a live trade show that has one timeline, one lead list, and a relatively known budget.

How a unified CRM solves many remote work challenges

Companies often try to alleviate remote work challenges by building CRM integrations with the tools that they use. While this approach can work, not all integrations are created equal. Each team member must juggle multiple user names, passwords, login URLs, and user interfaces. Data syncs take time to configure and routinely break, which means someone has to fix them. And, there’s the security and privacy risks associated with maintaining customer data in too many places.

By contrast, a unified CRM for sales, marketing, and delivery solves many of the challenges facing your remote teams. Staff spend less time jumping between systems and more time on what counts: delivering business value. Here are four specific reasons why a unified CRM can be a smart choice for your remote teams:

1. One system for sales, marketing, delivery, and support

A unified CRM creates alignment between your lead management activities and other parts of the customer journey, such as your email marketing campaigns, customer onboarding, delivery, and ongoing support. Staff from across multiple remote teams are able to use your CRM to perform their day-to-day tasks, which means they’ll spend less time jumping between systems, juggling passwords and trying to sync key data. They can view reports and build real time dashboards in one place and spend more time using the data, instead of trying to build reports from scratch and manually share with others.

2. One view of the customer journey

Aligning sales, marketing, and operations under one roof provides a more complete view of each customer. Customer email interactions, website engagement, conversations with your sales teams, and purchase history can be consolidated into one record in your CRM. This means your remote teams don’t have to hunt for data in siloed databases. Providing a single view makes it easier for demand-generation teams to understand the customer and design new promotional campaigns and outreach initiatives that maximize customer lifetime value.

3. Improved accountability

A CRM with built-in productivity capabilities—such as projects, milestones, and tasks—adds a new level of transparency and accountability that is not possible when each team is working in a vacuum. Automated follow-up tasks keep sales reps on track with important deals. Kanban-style project boards help marketers prioritize digital advertising campaigns and stay on budget. Converting booked deals to projects in your CRM helps operations teams streamline customer onboarding and reduces unnecessary confusion and delays.

4. Flexibility to preserve mission-critical integrations

Not every challenge can be solved natively by a unified CRM. To compete and grow business, you may need other mission-critical apps. Your bookkeeper will still need a third-party accounting system to track income and generate financial statements. If you’re an eCommerce shop, your shopping cart software is not going away. Be sure to check how your unified CRM handles app integrations. For example, Insightly recently introduced AppConnect, a no-code CRM integration tool that delivers 500+ prebuilt connectors to frequently used apps. You don’t have to be a coder to use it and it takes just moments to build each integration.

Remote teams thrive when unified

Remote team management is no small task. It takes a proactive strategy, commitment from leadership, and the right tools and technology. As you work toward greater alignment between your remote staff, be sure to at least consider how a unified CRM could alleviate your specific challenges.

Learn more about Insightly’s unified CRM here.

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If you’re like most marketers, you can rattle off a dozen ways off the top of your head. Ads, click-through rates, blog comments and Facebook likes, and industry research begin to scratch the surface. What about sales calls and customer success touch points? How about their deal size, billing cycle, or even their company holiday card?

To create a full picture of your customer, you have to gain customer insights from every angle. The easiest and most complete way to do this is by using a customer data platform.

What is a customer data platform?

According to the CDP Institute, a customer data platform is packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.

This means:

• A customer data platform must be a single software, not a combination of products.
• A CDP must export a persistent, unified customer database, not a fragmented system.
• A CDP must be accessible to other systems, not a standalone export.

How is a CDP different from a CRM?

But wait, what about your CRM? CRMs, or customer relationship management systems, have become integral to revenue operations. They provide invaluable insight into your customers. Further, they integrate with marketing, customer service, and financial programs. You may even use a unified CRM, which puts many of these integrations into one central system.

Here’s how a customer data platform differs from a customer relationship management system.

CDPs are managed by marketers 

This is unlike a CRM, which is managed by a sales operations manager or a system administrator. A digital marketing manager or analyst can manage a customer data platform.

CDPs are not used to manage customers

A customer data platform is not used to send emails, make calls, or market to customers. Instead, it analyzes things that have already happened.

CDPs go above & beyond the CRM

A customer relationship management system is a great data resource. But, it is not the only data resource. A CPD can enhance CRM data with marketing, service and financial information as well.

Your customer has a story before and after they become a data point. A customer data platform helps your digital marketing team tell that story, without gaps.

What kind of data does a CDP collect?

The customer data platform should collect customer insights at every touch point to provide a 360 degree view. Here are some examples of the types of data a CDP might collect:

Web data

Tools like Google Analytics document your customers’ web behavior. A customer data platform can aggregate links clicked, time on page and bounce rate. Combining this with other customer data can show meaningful trends in user behavior.

Customer identifiers

Your CRM integration will enhance your customer information. With a robust CRM, you can use identifying information to segment customer profiles. Data like names, birthdays and addresses creates fuller pictures of your customers.

Customer histories

Has your customer been around for six years or six months? Are they paying six figures or on a six-week free trial? This sales information, also in your CRM, profiles customers by their purchasing behavior.

Email or social media engagement

Who are the customers who like everything you post on Facebook, but never upgrade? What about those who haven’t opened a marketing email in over a year? These digital marketing analytics are powerful when aggregated with your other customer metrics.

Customer service data

You can learn a lot about a customer when studying how they use your customer service. Combining data from live chats, phone calls, and emails shows customers’ behavior over time and likelihood to churn.

Financial information

At the end of the day, you want to know what customers are purchasing, and for how much. A customer data platform shows lifetime value and total investment into your customers, including acquisition.

Benefits of using a customer data platform

Marketing bridges the gap between your customer and your product. Marketers typically understand their product extremely well. Why shouldn’t you understand your customer at the same level?

Benefits of a customer data platform include:

Campaign optimization to suit your customer profile

A customer data platform shows you which campaigns resonate with your customers. With this information, you can segment your marketing programs to meet customer needs.

Improving your sales cycle

With integrated marketing and sales data, a CDP can identify blockers in your funnel. This information allows you to smoothly move customers from marketing to sales.

Identification of customer correlations

Say you have a hunch that organic customers are more likely to contact customer support. A CDP can prove you right—or wrong. These correlations let you find alignments in your marketing, sales, and support functions.

Reintegration of customer data into other software

Customer data platforms integrate both ways. So, your marketing and sales software can use CDP data to improve your day-to-day functions.

Driving revenue

Better customer understanding = better marketing = better revenue.

Using a customer data platform to improve your marketing

How, exactly, does better customer understanding lead to better marketing? Here’s how a CDP can impact the success of your marketing campaigns.

CDP shows which channels bring in the most revenue

A CDP will draw a direct line between your marketing channel and lifetime revenue. You can invest more in the channels that are high revenue-drivers, and retire those that aren’t. This will increase your marketing ROI and decrease your customer acquisition cost.

CDP helps to improve your product marketing

Product marketing helps your customer better understand your company and product. A CDP uses your data to show customer touchpoints, pain points, and decision cycles. You can incorporate this information into segmented product marketing materials.

Create better segments with complete visibility

We all know digital marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all—it’s meant to be humanized. Our campaigns and programs work best when we tailor them to fit our customers’ needs. With a customer data platform, you can create more specific customer segments. With fewer assumptions, these segments are more accurate, measurable, and effective.

Conclusion

A customer data platform is a great tool to better understand your target audience. The insight into the entire business can be transformative for marketing success. If you are a marketer looking to better understand your customer, consider adding a CDP to your tech stack.

Interested in learning about Insightly’s unified platform for customer data management? Request a demo and see how you can better manage your customer data, align teams, and build stronger customer relationships.

Request a demo

Sources:
4 Types of Customer Data to Enhance Your Marketing Campaigns. Rob FitzGerald. ConnextDigital. June 20, 2019
8 Benefits of a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Jan Hendrik Fleury & Clemens Niekler. Crystalloids. October 7, 2019
Customer Data Platform Basics. Customer Data Platform Institute. 2021

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