In our previous article, we stressed the fact that a significant portion of CRM projects, across almost all industries, fails to be effectively implemented. It is no surprise. Even though a good system for customer relations management promises a lot of improvements, most teams lack a commitment to fully adopt it. Why does it happen? And how can one overcome these obstacles? 

Human Factor and Employee Resistance 

Back in 2013 Forrester published an interesting paper summarizing a survey of 600 individuals responsible for CRM. They pointed out the following fact: 42% of all respondents cited ‘people’ issues as a source of problems. 

More precisely, the most prominent ‘human-based difficulties included: 

  • Cultural resistance to adopting new patterns of work (45%)
  • Flawed user adoption process (44%)
  • Lack of planning and attention paid to change management (42%)
  • Bad leadership (38%)

No matter how efficient and convenient your CRM of choice might be unless you persuade your own team, you are almost doomed to fail. 

Steps to Make 

We are an experienced team that successfully built several CRM solutions. To succeed, we thoroughly interview our customers before, during, and after work. We drew some important lessons and would like to share them with you.  

– First of all, you should not impose a new CRM solution arbitrarily, with no prior consultation. Ask the members of your team about their preferences and priorities. These guidelines need to be taken into account while choosing a CRM. Customization is not a big deal nowadays, so you are not likely to experience problems in this respect. 

Among other things, the most popular questions to be asked are: 

  • How could a fresh CRM facilitate your professional activities?
  • Which unnecessary routines can be removed or reduced? 
  • What are the top five features you would like to see in the CRM?

– Second, communicate the advantages of your CRM to the employees. Make sure that they know: they will also benefit from the new framework. These points should address your people as individuals, with their personal interests. 

  • Highlight the fact that CRM is not exclusively a means of control, monitoring, and assessment. It is also a mechanism for rewards and incentives. 
  • You are also to demonstrate that the new system will strengthen – not weaken – their connection with customers. Consequently, your team members will be more likely to derive their own interests.  

– Third, train your employees properly in advance. What is even more important, your staff is to be educated and couched from the bottom up. It means that your courses shall meet such criteria as being:  

  • Relevant, with no unnecessary generalizations, and software-specific
  • Iterative, with each stage properly captured and repeated when needed 
  • Impact-driven, with success measured as practically as possible 

– Fourth, do not make your CRM too sophisticated (we at Evercode know that excessively complex things cause anxiety). We are not alone in this opinion. As Salesforce puts it, ‘approximately 72% of CRM users say that they would trade functional complexity for a simple CRM that is easier to use.’ So it would be a reasonable thing to do to check your solution against these criteria, at the very least: 

  • Does every screen of your workflow tell the users what they must do next 
  • Is your statistics easy to visualize, read, and, of course, interpret 

– Fifth, make it user-friendly. The key requirement here is to have a full-fledged mobile version. Again, Salesforce reminds us that the overwhelming majority of users are now using their respective CRM systems via mobile devices. 

That is to say, your solution of choice should either have a reliable and adaptive mobile version or even a well-thought-out app. 

Conclusion: The Evercode Lab Experience   

We invite you to take a look at this success story if you want to learn more about our CRM expertise. What we did back then was as follows: 

– Collecting info from the customer 

– Developing the CRM. This included custom sales methodologies, proper arrangement of contacts, payment control as well as email communications.  

– Integrating the CRM with internal and external data sources 

As the customer representative emphasized, he greatly enjoyed our ‘Agile approach. Regular feedback, the possibility of adjusting the technical specifications, weekly delivery of new features – all this made the development process more flexible.’ 

We believe that this is the only approach possible while working on a CRM. We would be happy to show the same approach to you. So contact us whenever you deem necessary.