Mistakes to Avoid While Implementing CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software provides enterprises with a wide array of features and enables them to offer consistent and improved customer experience. While most companies are increasingly integrating the CRM to track leads, automate marketing, and enhance customer services, its implementation success rate remains a major concern. Even though, you?ve dedicated plenty of time researching various CRM systems to find the best one with exciting features, a few missteps in migration can cause great problems and influence you to continue with your existing system.

Here we?ve listed a few common CRM issues that you should be aware of before starting to migrate a system.

Not defining Strategy

Lack of a proper strategy is the most common CRM implementation mistake to avoid. Many organizations neglect to specify what they are aiming to accomplish by implementing CRM before searching for one. As a result, they often fail to choose the right software that suits their specific requirements. Thus, before deciding on CRM software, invest time to research the issues you have with the existing system, and set time-bound realistic goals. If you have determined a clear view of what you?re hoping to obtain from a CRM solution, the probability of a successful implementation increases dramatically.

Insufficient Expertise

The success of software implementation lies in ensuring that all your associates are utilizing the new software. No matter how advanced the CRM is, if you don?t utilize it to its full potential, you will only be wasting time and resources. While importing the data into a new system, you must map out the necessary fields of every category manually, which is time-consuming. However, once the data migration is complete, learning how to use the software properly can still be tedious. So, make sure to onboard the right people, within your company or the CRM?s tech support team, with relevant expertise and provide necessary training to perform implementation effectively and efficiently.

Data Issues

In most cases, the data structure, categorization, and format of the enterprise contact centric models (existing system) are different from the company-centric models (a new CRM system), potentially creating various data transfer issues. Meaning the data needs to be modified as per the new system structure before the transfer of data. For example, if you are tracking the business activities in an excel sheet, you must ensure the format is correctly defined in the new system to eliminate duplicate or erroneous data. The data categories and format in the new system can be completely different. So, you must define and map the categories and format them before importing data into the new system. As you work with multiple customers, there is a high probability of data inconsistencies and duplication. Make sure to remove unwanted and duplicate data before moving to prevent data integrity problems in your new system.

Considering Budget at all times

CRM implementation, software upgrades, servers, up-front costs, and other long-term costs can make CRM software seem expensive. In an effort to stay on budget, some companies tend to cut down on some features and functionality of their CRM software, due to which they fail to utilize the full potential of the software. Although the budget is usually the most crucial factor in choosing software, the elimination of some critical features can lead to future inefficiencies. So, alongside considering the budget, think about the functionality your company will need in the long run.

Not Automating other Business Processes

Most businesses suffer from costs overrun due to human error, system downtime, and many more. While traditional ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) tools may seem appealing in most cases, they won?t enable you to maintain interconnected business processes and maximize uptime. So, look for an integrated system with pre-built connectors to transfer the data from the existing system, saving time, avoiding errors, and automating processes.

The Bottom Line

As mentioned above, there are a few mistakes in the CRM implementation process that can lead to diminished end-user productivity. Avoiding these pitfalls will increase the efficiency of the data migration process. Businesses should outline their goals, milestones, budget, and requirements to implement a CRM without any difficulty and utilize it to its full potential.