Your CRM system is failing you and your customers

This blog originally appeared on LinkedIn

Why your CRM system is failing you?

You have a robust CRM system, right?

It’s designed to manage interactions with current and future customers, sales, marketing, service. You will be surprised to know that it isn’t doing what it was set out to do. But why?

Customers. Relationships. Managing them.

So you laid out your CRM objectives. Defined requirements. Got demos from vendors. You even paid for the latest, greatest system, tailored to your specific business needs. Linked to your ERP systems, customer service, call centres. Deployed to the reps. Off to a great start – right? Maybe not.

If your CRM ROI is based on meeting all of those goals, then you have been too internally focused. CRM is about Customers, and the Relationship they have with your organization.

Think about the way your customers interact with your business. All of the touch points they have – from your web presence (think more than a website, here), to your reps, customer service, operations, technical support, call centres – and beyond. Beyond???

Most organizations are using their CRM as a contact manager on steroids. Maybe even as Sales Force Automation. Or they may have some marketing involvement. But unless you are using CRM to gain insights into the behaviour of your customers, you’re only capturing half of the value.

What should a good, great CRM system do?

The best way to think about your CRM system [from the very beginning] is to define it as a system that helps your people, processes, and technology gather lots of information about customers, their profiles & preferences, and how your organization is set up to respond to those needs.

That involves your sales, marketing, business development, market research, marketing communications, operations, customer service, technical support, service delivery and your social media, web marketers, and bloggers. And your PR team. And SEO team. And your app developers.

That’s right. Anyone who controls anything that has to do with a customer’s touch point with your brand should be plugged into your CRM system. It has to be simple enough for everyone involved to input data< and robust enough to draw trends from that data about your customer segments so that you can enable your teams to make intelligent decisions about how they will execute their next strategic move in support of – you guessed it. Managing your current and future customers’ relationships.

Ray Beharry is a Marketing & Sales Leader based out of the Greater New York City area. He can be reached via LinkedIn, email – [email protected], and is also on Twitter @RayBeharry.