It doesn’t come as a surprise that having great relationships with customers is critical to growing your business. Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the way in which customers buy and their habits have changed dramatically therefore it is of the utmost importance that your business differentiates itself from competitors by creating great relationships with customers to establish your business as the go to place for all requirements.
Therefore, making the switch to a CRM system allows you to effectively build and maintain these relationships. How will I know if my business is at this stage? Don’t worry as in our latest blog article, we will provide you with 6 such indications that your business requires a CRM system.
Before we get cracking with the indicators, in case you didn’t already know, let's define what a CRM is?
It is a strategy for managing your interactions with potential and existing customers that also helps you to improve on marketing, sales, service engagement and more.
Now, we know what a CRM is, let’s dive into the 6 key indications that you need a CRM system.
1 – Endless manual and tedious processes
It goes without saying but all businesses want to operate at an optimum efficiency and keep costs to a minimum, however most businesses are unaware that using a CRM system can bring with it a whole host of benefits as well as keeping costs down in the long term. Simplifying processes by automating manual and tedious ones can save time and help to reduce both costs on admin and management.
2 – Long winded data entry practices
Using Microsoft Excel or paper-based systems to log customer data can be extremely inefficient and runs a higher risk of mistakes being made when recording it. Having duplicate customer records, spelling mistakes and other errors can waste your resources, time and money. As well as this, using manual data input can prevent other employees being able to easily access customer data.
If you invested in a CRM system, this process is improved tenfold. Better still, forms can be adjusted depending on which data you need from customers, data which can then be easily accessed by people across your business from one place.
3 – Poor internal communication and collaboration practices
It goes without saying but working in a business where communication across all different functions is bad doesn’t make good for a healthy place to work. Having a leading CRM system in place such as Dynamics 365 can help to enhance communication by allowing you to track all engagements around the customer experience and streamline it into one central location. This will mean that your colleagues will be able to easily discover which part of the customer journey they currently occupy which straight away makes it easier for all stakeholders to work in a more cohesive way.
4 – Poor lead management
A huge sign that your business needs a CRM system now is if you are being flooded with leads which you aren’t able to handle due to poor process. Granted, we would all like inbound leads in their droves, however if you don’t have the necessary infrastructure to cope with them, it could impact on your business in a negative way. This is the perfect situation where a CRM system could help as it can help you to prioritise and organise your leads. Furthermore, a CRM can show you leads in priority order, assign each one to the right salesperson and store templates or messages to make sure that the overall sales process runs as smooth as possible.
5 – Your business is growing rapidly
As your business continues to grow, you will find that this reveals some problems with current processes. Put simply, this means that the continued use of Excel spreadsheets or paper-based systems would limit your business’s growth and make it almost impossible to grow any further. Not having a seamless system to help you grow and maintain these customer relationships, the lack of an effective sales process, the inability to easily track marketing campaigns, the inability to collate data and the inability to extract valuable insights from your data will no doubt hold your business back.
6 – Using multiple complex and uncoordinated systems
This may sound like it is stating the obvious but having your sales, customer service and marketing in different systems can cause chaos across your business. In addition to this, it is a complete waste of time training staff on multiple systems when using one CRM system could allow all functions of the business to streamline their functions. Once implemented, a CRM system will help to improve the overall user efficiency as all your critical data will be stored in one central location which can be accessed from all departments no matter where they are based.
Next Steps?
If you are a business that has read the above article and is keen to make Excel spreadsheets and paper based systems a thing of the past then please get in touch with one of our team of Dynamics 365 experts to discuss your specific requirements. Better still, if you don’t need any further convincing that a Microsoft CRM is right for your business then why not take a look at our Quick Start CRM package?
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