The firm advises a robust customer relationship management platform to support a range of organizational objectives for customer engagement and enable a 360-degree view of all customer interactions.
Over the last five years, as organizations look to mature their marketing, sales, and customer service capabilities, the market for customer relationship management (CRM) platforms has experienced an explosion of growth. However, despite the importance of CRMs in managing end-to-end customer interactions, many organizations struggle to choose the right vendor and roll out the solution effectively and cost-effectively. To help IT leaders select the right CRM solution tailored to their business needs, global IT research and advisory firm Info-Tech Research Group has published its research-backed resource, the Customer Relationship Management Platform Selection Guide.
Info-Tech’s research explains that CRM tools are essential business applications that offer a wide range of features to assist with customer interaction processes across marketing, sales, and customer service. These suites supplant more basic applications for customer interaction management, such as the contact management module of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform or office productivity suite.
“CRM selection must be a multistep process that involves defining target capabilities for marketing, sales, and customer service,” says Ben Dickie, research lead at Info-Tech Research Group. “It is also important that organizations prioritize requirements across functional categories, determine the architecture model for the CRM environment, and develop a comprehensive RFP that can be weighted.”
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In the new guide, Info-Tech advises that selecting a CRM platform should be based on the overall customer experience management (CXM) strategy and organizations should align their CRM selection with the CXM framework. To get the best fit for the organization’s requirements, the firm recommends determining if there is a need for a CRM platform that skews toward marketing, sales, or customer service. While a CRM suite offers a host of native capabilities, tightly integrating the CRM solution with other parts of the customer experience ecosystem can provide a 360-degree view of the customers.
“To succeed with CRM implementation, IT leaders should create a detailed roadmap that outlines milestones for configuration, security, points of implementation, data migration, training, and ongoing application maintenance,” explains Dickie.
According to the research, an effective selection and implementation of a CRM system can result in increased revenue and decreased costs for businesses by improving customer satisfaction and streamlining efforts across different business domains. In addition, Info-Tech’s findings, outlined in the new guide, show that nearly all CRM vendors offer the following functionality:
Lead Management: Tracks and captures a lead’s information, automatically building a profile. Leads are then qualified through contact scoring models. Assigning leads to sales is typically automated.
Pipeline Management: Enables oversight over future sales, including revenue forecasting based on past/present trends, tracking sales velocity, and identifying ineffective sales processes.
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Contact Management: Tracks and stores customer data, including demography, account and billing history, social media, and contact information. Typically, records and fields can be customized.
Campaign Management: Provides integrated omnichannel campaign functionality and data analysis of customer intelligence. Further, data insights can be used to drive new and effective marketing campaigns.
Customer Service Management: Provides integrated omnichannel customer experiences to provide convenient service. It includes case and ticket management, automated escalation rules, and third-party integrations.
Identifying the root causes of systemic issues is crucial to achieving a successful CRM implementation, even if the CRM solution has all the necessary features. Hence, businesses must describe their current state and provide a review of their background leading up to this point. In addition, they should discuss the objectives they have been assigned to achieve and their challenges while attempting to address the identified issues.