Customer Relationship Management or CRM (as we know) implementation brings a change in management initiative for any organisation. So, it is good to have a comprehensive plan on how to initiate the process and ensure that it is implemented correctly and adopted by most of the end users. A CRM implementation strategy should be planned to understand the business needs and get the business user involvement right since the early stages of the implementation process. Once the business needs are identified, it has to be mapped into the language of CRM along with the gap analysis of the needs and product features. All the business processes are to be captured and if there is no established process for satisfying a business need, a best practice business process has to be created.
Once all business processes are captured, plan the timelines and estimates of the project. The most important element of any CRM Implementation Strategy is the people. Sometimes we may have the best CRM, but there are instances where no one or probably very few people are using it. So, an effective CRM strategy should include an understanding of the organisation’s end user’s intellectual capacity to adopt. If the CRM is a first time experience for most of the employees, an adoption strategy should be developed to educate them about the CRM tool and the benefits that they can derive from it personally and at organisational level. Along with that, a comprehensive end user training, catering to their own daily activities is a must to ensure CRM is taken seriously by the end users from inception.
Any organisation, whether it is implementing CRM for the first time or migrating from an existing process/product, needs to ensure that there is a comprehensive migration of the data for the end users. Understanding the process as to where the data is currently being stored and how it gets moulded once a new CRM is implemented, helps in coming out with a Data Migration plan when the system is ready for testing. As a part of the CRM strategy, timelines and responsibilities should be planned at the earliest, so that it does not surprise during the final stages.
With a few hundred CRM implementations to our kitty and SugarCRM’s continuous and comprehensive trainings, Bhea is equipped in delivering CRM Implementation Strategy sessions at your organisation and explicitly capture the business needs. Once the business needs are captured, an effective implementation strategy will be designed for planning CRM for your organisation.
