The Benefits of CRM to the Individual and the Entire Business

Many businesses have used CRM tools inside their sales, marketing and customer support departments. But this often creates “silos” of data and expertise that are not widely shared with the rest of the company—making it impossible to fully streamline customer processes.

The lack of widespread system deployment stems from organizations choosing inflexible tools that cannot be integrated, or ones that are too expensive to get every customer-facing team member synchronized, regardless of department. As a result, most people who use CRM software view it as a time drain instead of a powerful, efficient tool to help them be more effective.

When organizations deploy a system that is designed with individuals in mind, both internal users and external customers win. Employees become more productive when they gain access to more insightful business data. In addition, this more personalized approach can lead to increased customer satisfaction because customers feel like they are being treated as valued individuals with unique requirements.

To fully reap the benefits of it for the entire customer-facing organization, those who use the system every day must actually want to use it. No matter how grand your plans are for it, they will fall short unless every user is committed. Getting every employee on board who supports customers means giving them a solution that works the way they do – as individuals.

In addition to offering innovative, individualized CRM, it is also important to equip more than just quota-carrying sales reps and customer support agents with access to its functionality and data. Today, many more individuals touch the customer, or are part of a customer-facing process, in addition to sales and support professionals. By equipping everyone who interacts with customers, organizations can further optimize processes, increase service levels, and boost customer loyalty.

Expanding its usage to a wider set of users might seem like a costly endeavor. And with many systems, this can absolutely be the case. A lot of providers simply look to squeeze every last license dollar they can out of their customers.

However, some vendors understand the power of making CRM accessible to a broader range of individuals inside every organization, and have priced their offerings to be more affordable and thus more widely deployed.

The price should also be transparent. Not just for the initial deployment, but for the foreseeable future as well. This means no hidden fees, forced upgrades to more expensive editions based on arbitrary limitations, or “nickel and dime” fees for required features such as mobile access.

By deploying modern tools designed with individual users and individual organizations in mind, you can take a giant leap in the right direction. The good news is that the ease of today’s cloud-based technology makes it even more cost effective and painless than ever to get started. When the technology works the way you work, and within your budget – your only limitation is your imagination.