Top CRM Training Mistakes

Published on March 7, 2020
4 min read
Marketing
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4 min read
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The customer is the bloodline of any company. No matter what you are into, no matter what your niche is, no matter what the products or services you offer, the customers are the most important assets in your business. The clients provide invaluable feedback and serve as a springboard for new concepts and ideas. How can we forget the revenue they bring in? If you do not try to find out what your customers think about your product or service, you will never be able to deliver to them the best customer experience they can ever have. Their feedback about the experience they have with your brand is the most helpful tool you can use to adjust your business to fit their needs and wants. By as much as 27%, CRMs are known to improve customer retention.

CRM is a company-wide business strategy designed to improve profitability, minimize costs, and increase customer loyalty. It is the combination of strategies and technologies that companies integrate to manage and study customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. The ultimate goal is to improve customer service relationships and increase customer retention that drives sales growth.

CRM helps companies build a strong relationship with their clients which in then will eventually turn to customer loyalty and better client retention. Client loyalty increases the revenues of business by encouraging repeat business, reducing marketing and operating costs, and is a very powerful way to generate word of mouth. CRM is an approach that will surely result in increased revenue for companies. This tool generates a simple UI for your collection of data that helps companies reach, recognize, and communicate with customers at ease and in an extensible means.

CRM can be applied in a lot of ways like websites, social media, phone calls, chat, mail, e-mail, and a variety of marketing materials. Whether your business is large or small, you can surely benefit from using a CRM solution due to its diversity. It has been the basis for scalable sales and marketing systems. Any business can benefit from having data that is available through customers’ mobile app usage, digital clicks, interactions on social media and more. Businesses must take advantage of these data to deliver the experiences customers are looking for.

Creating an engaging customer experience provides you a true competitive advantage against your competitors. By integrating advanced analytics, companies can make better use of their customer user experience data that will lead to higher satisfaction and encourage customer loyalty in the long run.

CRM had been present for a long time and choosing the best CRM platform and implementing it can be very difficult. It is crucial to take the right approach in evaluating CRM systems to avoid the very costly consequences of selecting the wrong CRM solution.

Here are some common CRM training mistakes that companies have to correct.

1. Lack of Employee Training

It is very important to allocate some time and host CRM training workshops so your staff feels more familiar with your new software when you implement a new CRM. Encourage your staff to engage more time on training even on outside workshops even if they do not want to. By this, you can ensure that the efficiency and productivity of your business are long-lasting. One of the major positive effects of implementing CRM is the ability to update, rationalize, and make your work process more efficient that will generally step up the way you run your company. Your CRM would be useless if your employees do not make any effort to learn how to use your new tool.

2. A Lot of Unnecessary Input

Ensure that you only input the most important data you need whenever marketing and sales staff inputs customer and leads contact data. If there are additional important data and notes, your staff can go back to it later on. When your employees focus on too many input fields, they might get stuck in minutiae, instead of getting new deals and interacting with potential customers. 

3. Incoherent Data

It is essential that your staff inputs accurate and consistent data into the system as CRM manages a large amount of customer data and other large envelops of information. With the powerful automation capabilities of CRMs, errors can easily be amplified. If your employees would not be able to build trust and confidence in your new solution, they will want to go back to the old CRM that you have been using before.

4. Being Overambitious with the Software

Purchasing a new CRM solution could be very exciting and interesting. With CRM software, you can gain access to new tools and capabilities to help your business grow and become a revenue-generating machine. Instead of allocating a lot of time for strenuous analysis, the CRM solution will allow you to immediately get to work on creating new marketing strategies or develop a stronger sales plan. You need to give your employees more time to get used to the new solution for them to utilize efficiently these new features. Design plans that will aide your team step by step to meet goals and deliver items over a long period of time.

5. Non-integration of Other Systems

It is a must to integrate your new solution with systems and tools that your business is already utilizing. By this, data access and the transfer would be more seamless and easy. It also allows you to combine previous data from different departments.

6. Team Members are not Supportive

Having an unsupportive team is a very big problem when implementing a new CRM. Ensure that your team knows why you are changing into the new software. Make sure that they truly agree with your decision. Make them understand how the pros outweigh the disadvantages. Internal resistance will result in a waste of money because no one might actually use your new tool.

7. No Established Definition of Success

Establishing a clear definition of success by keeping track of how the new solution is serving you. Set a distinct goal in every area of your business that will be involved in the new CRM solution. If your brand new solution is not serving you most optimally, it is better to find out as soon as possible.

10. Neglecting Mobile Access

People nowadays are always on the go. Most employees are using phones, tablets, and another portable technology as mobile technology is advancing. If your business utilizes remote workers or frequently traveling employees, having a CRM with mobile access will be best for you. CRM applications integrate with native mobile functionalities like photo or video import, scanner, making phone calls, and access to contact data.

11. CRM is not just a Software

CRM is a very powerful tool. However, it does not do the work for you automatically and solve every problem of your business. CRM only provides you a set of tools and functionalities, and it is up to your employees to utilize it more efficiently and effectively. Implementing this tool will surely change your work culture so make sure everybody in your team has an open mindset.

12. Neglecting Social Media Functions

Modern marketing is directly synonymous with interacting with your customers over their social media. Effectively use their online information and preferences into your marketing strategies. You need not to just collect their data. You need to analyze it and utilize it to tailor their specific needs and demands and create effective campaigns. This is crucially important for your business as this will help you provide better customer service.

13. Misusing Email Capabilities

It does not mean that you are capable of sending a lot of emails to potential customers you should be doing that constantly. This will just simply annoy your prospective clients. It is important to brief your marketing not to do this. The CRM is just a tool to help your team perform their job easily and effectively.

Buying and implementing a new CRM tool can be very exciting but it can be a tough endeavor at times. Businesses are very eager to make their workflow more effective and efficient; employees are very keen to have access to new features and solutions to help them during work. It is essential to be hands-on and consider the common CRM training mistakes you can make when trying your brand new CRM product as CRM deployment and implementation can have cross-enterprise ramifications.

April 5, 2020