One of the most efficient approaches to maintain and create a long term valuable customer relationship is to implement a CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
The main goal of CRM is to increase the interaction and manage the current and future customers by fulfilling and understanding their expectations and requirements.
As of now, there are many CRM platforms available in the market, such as Salesforce, Zoho, and InfusionSoft.
Before performing a CRM, you need to choose the best CRM implementation model for your business. When it comes to implementing a successful CRM, there are three main components on which this implementation is based on:
- Technology – it is a central part of any CRM implementation
- People – as when you will be implementing a new CRM, you also need to train the people as they will be handling this CRM.
- Business processes – developing a proper business process is essential for any software to work efficiently.
Now, it’s time to understand what all are the steps that you need to follow to implement the CRM. Following are the six steps for the CRM implementation process:
Step 1 – Identify the reason for needing a CRM for your organization:
Before implementing any new software in your business, you need to understand the reason behind doing so. So the first step of implementing the CRM is to identify why you need a CRM for your organization. You can quickly start by identifying the areas that require improvement and the problems that you need to take care of.
Once you believe that these improvements can be made by implementing a CRM, then start the process of implementation.
Step 2 – Create a perfect CRM team:
It would help if you were very careful while developing a CRM implementation team because each member of the team will be equally responsible for handling some of the essential things in CRM.
At an initial level, you should include the following roles in the team:
- Project manager
- Application analysis
- Application developer
- QA test engineer
- Representatives from all significant users groups
Once you are done with creating a perfect CRM team, you can move on to the next step.
Step 3 – Search for a suitable CRM vendor:
The next step is to research suitable vendors that can provide CRM software. There are many things that you need to take care of while selecting a suitable vendor that fits for your organization. You need to take care of the following things while choosing the one:
- The strength and weaknesses of the CRM software provided by the vendor
- The total experience of the vendor’s CRM in the market
- Check the level of customer support they provide
- Ask for customer references.
One thing that you need to make sure while buying a CRM software is to see whether the features of that software fulfil the requirements of your organization.
Step 4 – Develop a budget:
While searching for a suitable CRM vendor, you need to be very clear about a realistic budget that you can use for getting the plan accordingly. But make sure that your budget does not affect the implementation.
Step 5 – Develop a strategy for implementing CRM:
Now that you are done with getting a perfect CRM software for your organization, it is finally the time to make a strategy of implementing the CRM.
You need to understand how the members of the CRM team will be involved in the process of CRM. Then you need to give them proper training so that they can handle the work with efficiency.
You can also optimize and integrate the CRM processes in your organization to start the process. The strategy of implementing the CRM must be based on the CRM implementation model that you have chosen.
After strategizing the CRM implementation, you need to begin rolling out your CRM. In the process of rolling out the CRM, you need to do CRM data migration and system testing to make sure that the CRM is working correctly. Once this is done, you can go live with CRM.
Step 6 – Monitor the success of your CRM implementation:
So now that you are done with rolling out the CRM, it’s time to evaluate the success of your implementation. You can do this by referring to the system activity and records.
These were the six steps that you need to follow for implementing a CRM.
