How to fail the introduction of CRM-system?
One of my colleagues really wanted to have an iPhone 4S. Then it was just the top of the ponta. Having received the award, she refused to leave and bought it - white, pleasantly weighty, the envy of the entire commercial service. After some time, she began to complain that, they say, she did not understand what everyone had found in these iPhones, the dialer and the dialer, it’s scary to drop it, well, and the photos are not bad. Speaking of words about applications, functions, photo stream, updates, and so on, she said that she turned off access to the Internet, because it is expensive and in general pampering. Thus, she turned the top-of-its-time smartphone into a ringing brick. “What a stupid one!”, We laughed, for sure, some readers thought in the same way.
I do not think so long ago - since I work with the introduction of corporate software. Smoking Kazbek and saving on matches is practically the motto of small and medium business in all that relates to IT. As a result: inefficiency, failure to implement, money to the wind, hatred of all software at once and contempt for successful projects.
In general, write down ways to fail the introduction of CRM, and indeed any software, - in the end, the smart learns from the mistakes of others.
')
There are statistics that from 20% to 60% of CRM-projects fail or do not meet expectations. To be honest, weird statistics: firstly, this figure is not a fork of meaning, and secondly, what kind of CRM and in what sphere, thirdly, vendor or partner? In principle, for our RegionSoft CRM development team, it’s clear what we ’re most likely to talk about and where the numbers come from. Partial implementations probably got into the statistics (when the software is used in a small part of the functions and does not please the company at all), subjectively unsuccessful implementations (the company does not like everything, but it continues to use the system for which it paid), etc. In fact, there may be several reasons for failures, and each business will formulate them as unique, but in fact a large but finite list of reasons for unsuccessful and unsatisfactory implementations of CRM systems can be identified. Our team has gathered the most-most, and is ready to tell you about them. Do not stuff your bumps - study others!
Something like the companies that bought CRM and use it to a minimum or not at all
Among others, perhaps, the lack of focus on the objectives of the company. Often, companies are looking for a CRM system not for the sake of increasing sales, optimizing business processes, and increasing the quality of service, but only for the sake of “so that it is. This is initially unsuccessful implementation: there is no understanding how you will use the tool, which means it will remain unclaimed.
What to do? Determine the goals of the company and the goals of implementing a CRM system It is desirable that they correlate, in simple terms, to have points of contact. The process is quite simple: take a sheet, write company goals (preferably by department or employee), take a second one - write CRM implementation goals. From this point on, you begin to form requirements for a CRM system, with which you can start working with vendors. It is especially important to determine the goals if your company is engaged in a specific activity: advertising, publishing, medical services, transportation, and so on.
Over 12 years of implementation of RegionSoft CRM, we realized that it rarely happens that the whole team, “for one,” was ready to accept a CRM system and promoted the quickest start of operation. This is a fiction story. More often, the introduction of a CRM system is imposed from above: a directive descends, installation is made, training is conducted (at best!), Work begins. Everything. They did not ask anyone, did not consider anyone's requests, did not work with the early followers, and later ignored the majority.
In such a situation, the implementation can be successful due to the experience of top management and the efforts of the vendor, but the adoption of the system and the beginning of its productive work are postponed for an indefinite period, because questions, quiet strikes, and even outright boycotts begin. Employees are not psychologically ready to accept innovation, they are afraid of control and tightening the screws in the company. Why all? Because the CRM-system was introduced for a tick, and not for work - for example, for the CIO or CTO to receive annual bonuses for automation. Such is the corporate lobby.
What to do? Of course, in the corporate reality, directives from above are not news, and to avoid such decisions is sometimes even impractical. But in the case of the introduction of software, which will be used by everyone, the situation is different: if the staff do not support the project, they will, if not fail, then guaranteed to complicate. Therefore, implementation must be a collective decision: with justification, discussion, collection of requirements and quality gradual learning. This does not exclude the problems of adopting a new program, but each unit will have an understanding of who will use the CRM system and how.
Even advanced users can get into a light stupor when they first see the new interface. What to say about users with a late adaptation period? For example, the sales person used 1C to create accounts and other software he had never seen before, and suddenly a new interface appeared before him, sometimes completely different for 1C. Trivial psychology works - active resistance to everything new. Under these conditions, the worst thing you can do is to abandon vendor training or turn it into a formal lecture. An untrained employee, left to himself or to help with the program, is very likely to abandon this bad job and return to 1C or Excel. He just familiar and comfortable in them. CRM will lose all meaning.
What to do? We have already talked about how to implement a CRM system with good training, but we repeat once again the most basic, simple rules that solve most of the problems of adapting employees to a new software (not only to the CRM system).
No, in any case, do not think that you buy a CRM and it will not suddenly start. With serious vendors, this does not happen. Four major troubles can happen here.
In general, it is difficult to imagine a CRM system that works in the same way as some are advertised. Our favorite promises among others are setting in an hour, starting in 15 minutes, free without limits, implementation in three days / half an hour / hour / 15 minutes, introduction without training, and a sales funnel that “conducts the client itself”. Such advertising, which has nothing to do with reality, leads to the fact that companies consider the CRM system to be unnecessary or endow it with some kind of almost magical properties, and then become frustrated.
What to do? Surprise the vendor - ask him about the technical details of the CRM-system. Do not be afraid to appear ignorant or to confuse the mail client with the mail server. You do not have to understand these details (unless, of course, you have a CIO or CTO - this is rare for small and medium businesses), but the vendor is obliged to tell you and explain all the technical details: what kind of DBMS and how much it costs, what kind of load it can withstand; what are the CRM system requirements; Is there an integrated email client and business process editor? what about telephony and so on.
The first aspect of this approach is the expectation that the installed software will create a miracle, make sales and make a profit. The program itself will not solve anything, it is intended to be an instrument of a complex system of business processes and customer relationship strategies. Relatively speaking, if your salespeople are sitting on Facebook or Ozon all day, the marketer draws another formal SWOT analysis and holds the hundredth meeting in a month, and the customer service sends clients to the waiting mode for a week or two, CRM doesn’t do anything will, on the contrary, become an extra asset and an unjustified investment. Because yes - this is just a program: a shell, a kernel, an interface. And if you do not find ways to improve the work of employees in this program, it will be idle.
CRM-system in its essence - application software. And the hero of “Nedoroslya” Fonvizin in this case would be right if he said that once applied, it means that something needs to be attached. Namely - to apply to the general corporate efforts to develop sales and work with customers. If you want another example, CRM is a catalyst to speed up the work of complex reactions and interactions within a business.
The second aspect of a purely technical approach is to shift the issue of introducing a CRM system (from selection to operation) entirely on the shoulders of the IT department or system administrator. This is fraught with the fact that you will receive the most technically clever system with the ideal settings, which will again stand idle because it does not meet the requirements of the commercial service, marketers, support, logisticians - that is, the main users.
What to do? As we have said, to make the implementation of a collective process, create a working group and teach employees to work productively with the selected CRM system. By the way, the internal expert that we talked about above should also be from the active user groups, and not from the IT department. This way you can, among other things, avoid IT pressure on users and users' feelings of technical illiteracy, which often demotivates a lot. “So, what about the registry? Cleaned up? How not? Well, through cmd and regedit. Yes, this child knows! ”- if the article is read by people who are far from the administration, they clearly know how to cringe from these words at the first incomprehensible hangs of the PC. I recommend in response to say: "Premium? Are you not aware of the structure of payroll and retained earnings for the quarter? EBITDA and EBIT have not been calculated yet, so we are waiting for the values ​​calculated according to RAS. ”
This is just the top reason for the failure of the CRM system. It's simple: if you do not have a vision of streamlined business processes in a company, you do not have a CRM strategy. Of course, in the end, 99% of companies aim to generate income, but this task can not be the goal of the business process and the implementation of CRM. This is the result of fulfilling some goals relevant to the company: increasing the customer life cycle, increasing the number of sales, increasing the average check amount, increasing market share, etc. And for such purposes, that is, under the strategy of customer relationship management (CRM), the software should be sharpened - your CRM system. If you do not know what your strategy is and there is no understanding of the processes, the implementation may turn into a drain on the budget. But if there is a vision or you are ready to review and optimize business processes, CRM will give the company resistance to external challenges, because you will have a strong foundation from a high-quality customer base, analytics and automation of routine.
What to do? Business process reengineering is where the implementation should begin. How to do this, we told in our article about business processes and implementation . If there are difficulties, connect a vendor to this work, or at least a good consultant (not to be confused with trainers and information gyms!). But I am convinced that the best way for the company is to independently understand the business processes, draw diagrams, assign stages, deadlines and responsible ones, remove all unnecessary and only then learn from the vendor to automate them in the interface of the selected CRM system. By the way, this can be done after the start of operation of the system - moreover, in many ways it is even better.
Well, another immutable rule: changed the business process - immediately make changes to the CRM-system.
CRM in a company with non-debugged business processes. Really, nothing unusual?
Patching the introduction of a CRM system is another big mistake. It can take different forms - let's look at a few examples with different participants.
These are two fairly common situations, of course there are others: unwillingness to transfer data, rare use, fragmentary input of information, etc. Moreover, this behavior does not depend on the convenience of the system, its interface, speed of operation and other parameters - the human factor prevails here.
It also happens: the CRM system begins to slip in perfectionism. The system does not start up until users configure and learn absolutely all the functions, work with the system is postponed for a long time. This situation is fraught with the fact that the work will not begin, because it is difficult to make an ideal CRM-system, without starting to fully work in it and without understanding the features in real conditions. Best practices come only through experience of use.
What to do? The best cure for patch deployment is forward and continuous implementation: complex settings (for example, integration with a virtual PBX, business process modeling) should be conducted in parallel with the start of operation, data entry and the filling of the CRM system with working entities. Firstly, it will allow to see the early effect, secondly it will reduce the payback period, and thirdly, it will greatly facilitate the perception of the CRM system by employees, since the changes will be gradual and they will not have to master all the modules and functions at once. At the same time, CRM should not be mastered exclusively “on the tops”, it is necessary to use maximum functionality, to find application for all modules. At first glance, some of the opportunities may seem superfluous, but with a more detailed approach, it becomes clear that business automation is multifaceted and more effective it is.
CRM was simply bought (more often - rented), but not implemented. This is a common story: many of us have paid subscriptions that we don’t use, companies regularly have a paid, but not set up or just poorly functioning corporate portal, Yandex.Direct, a blog on Habré, etc. The bills are paid, the service isn’t is used. The same thing happens with the CRM system - paid for, and, well, we’re about to start, we’re about to have a meeting and we’ll distribute our responsibilities, about to ... In fact, this is a kind of procrastination on a corporate scale.
What to do? First of all, to figure out why this happened: CRM-system is inconvenient, slow, does not provide the necessary features? And to deal with these very reasons, and then take steps to put the software into operation or replace it with a similar, but more suitable solution.
Bargaining with a vendor is a great way to kill a deployment and pay twice. The vendor will agree with your amount and will go to optimize their processes, which will inevitably lead to a decrease in the quality of implementation. Open the secret: for small and medium-sized businesses, CRM is quite inexpensive, and saving an extra hundred thousand rubles can fail a cool implementation.
What to do? First of all, do not be kept on promises about a free CRM-system and CRM with a 70% discount. This is the first reason that generates the desire to save - well, why pay if it happens for free? It is important to understand that a CRM system does not always cost as much as it is written in the price list, usually the implementation costs more . Paying for the implementation of a CRM system, you invest in your business, in its qualitative development. On this, as well as on corporate security (which, by the way, includes a CRM-system), you should not save.
Looping CRM only on sales automation and using the system as a to-do list and a list for dialing is another common mistake. And it is to blame for the market in which CRM is called absolutely everything: from an electronic notebook to almost ERP. There used to be a division into SFA and CRM, and the latter was assigned the correct role of a universal tool for automating all business processes related to customers, and not just sales.
If CRM is used exclusively as a sales funnel + client base storage facility, it will turn out like this: activity is growing and even revenue is growing, but growth is extensive. And if you pay attention to the quality of staff actions, go deeper into business processes - growth will be deferred, but intense. By the way, the best option is to combine extensive use of the system with building up its potential and achieving progress (the very gradual introduction about which we wrote above).
What to do? Use the CRM-system to the fullest, and not just for sales. For example, we in the company use RegionSoft CRM for sales, marketing, advertising, technical support and, of course, development. Our customers use it as a warehouse program and logistics management system and production, etc. Once the relevant modules are provided - why not? In principle, there are very few pure CRMs left on the market for sales, so use all the opportunities provided to you and you will quickly get used to the high productivity of the automated team.
Choosing CRM based on some very strange criteria is a pitiful path to collapse. The choice of CRM "alien mind" is very similar to the process of cheating in school: like mindlessly tore off, and good zero, one continuous harm. You must admit that it is not serious to do it to adults, and even in the most valuable and in fact vital - in your business or in your work.
In the previous post in the comments broke a revealing discussion about how in a single company approach the choice of CRM. The user Habra with enviable persistence attacked us with the question of where our comparison with competitors is, why this marketing RegionSoft is not ready to issue such a file. We expressed our position and even conceived a separate angry post on this topic, but so far we have got cold and set out the most erroneous starting points for choosing a CRM system.
What to do? To be guided by your company's requirements for the CRM system, choose it yourself, test demo versions, do not go for advertising promises and brand, pay attention to the vendor’s professionalism. In general, the key decisions for businesses to make their smart, cold and sober head.
By the end of this post, we failed to implement it ten times, and it has not been said that the cause of the fiasco is often the lack of leadership and top managers, the corruption of department heads, the formal attitude to work, internal corporate conflicts, the vendor's fragility (more often - partners, which he is gaining anyhow, without evaluating the expertise) and even the economic situation in the country.
So, since it is so scary, maybe not to introduce? Of course not.On the contrary, arm yourself with information and implement CRM in a way that your competitors cannot do. Speaking very simply, CRM should solve two tasks: to facilitate the work of managers and to ensure transparency of operations for managers. These tasks benefit each employee of the organization, directly help to get even with the routine and start earning more. Yes, the introduction of CRM - this is not "15 minutes", it is a painstaking and thorough process, but this is the case when the game is worth the candle.
Our channel in Telegram , in which without advertising we write not quite formal things about CRM and business.
I do not think so long ago - since I work with the introduction of corporate software. Smoking Kazbek and saving on matches is practically the motto of small and medium business in all that relates to IT. As a result: inefficiency, failure to implement, money to the wind, hatred of all software at once and contempt for successful projects.
In general, write down ways to fail the introduction of CRM, and indeed any software, - in the end, the smart learns from the mistakes of others.
')
There are statistics that from 20% to 60% of CRM-projects fail or do not meet expectations. To be honest, weird statistics: firstly, this figure is not a fork of meaning, and secondly, what kind of CRM and in what sphere, thirdly, vendor or partner? In principle, for our RegionSoft CRM development team, it’s clear what we ’re most likely to talk about and where the numbers come from. Partial implementations probably got into the statistics (when the software is used in a small part of the functions and does not please the company at all), subjectively unsuccessful implementations (the company does not like everything, but it continues to use the system for which it paid), etc. In fact, there may be several reasons for failures, and each business will formulate them as unique, but in fact a large but finite list of reasons for unsuccessful and unsatisfactory implementations of CRM systems can be identified. Our team has gathered the most-most, and is ready to tell you about them. Do not stuff your bumps - study others!
Not sure - do not implement
Among others, perhaps, the lack of focus on the objectives of the company. Often, companies are looking for a CRM system not for the sake of increasing sales, optimizing business processes, and increasing the quality of service, but only for the sake of “so that it is. This is initially unsuccessful implementation: there is no understanding how you will use the tool, which means it will remain unclaimed.
What to do? Determine the goals of the company and the goals of implementing a CRM system It is desirable that they correlate, in simple terms, to have points of contact. The process is quite simple: take a sheet, write company goals (preferably by department or employee), take a second one - write CRM implementation goals. From this point on, you begin to form requirements for a CRM system, with which you can start working with vendors. It is especially important to determine the goals if your company is engaged in a specific activity: advertising, publishing, medical services, transportation, and so on.An example from life. The company was engaged in several activities and finally began to pick up a CRM. Since the company was in Moscow, they without thinking twice, bought CRM based on considerations "these are heard." The vendor’s partners made an impressive presentation and sold cheerfully (signed a lease on the SaaS model) 27 seats. It quickly turned out that the CRM is not suitable for the type of activity, besides, it is “lame” at the email client, and for the company this is ultra critical. After six months of torment and horse accounts for the finalization of the contract for the CRM-system was terminated. The reason is simple: the company did not set goals, and the vendor’s partner did not even think about asking them - why, when can you just close the deal?
CRM need someone for a tick
Over 12 years of implementation of RegionSoft CRM, we realized that it rarely happens that the whole team, “for one,” was ready to accept a CRM system and promoted the quickest start of operation. This is a fiction story. More often, the introduction of a CRM system is imposed from above: a directive descends, installation is made, training is conducted (at best!), Work begins. Everything. They did not ask anyone, did not consider anyone's requests, did not work with the early followers, and later ignored the majority.
In such a situation, the implementation can be successful due to the experience of top management and the efforts of the vendor, but the adoption of the system and the beginning of its productive work are postponed for an indefinite period, because questions, quiet strikes, and even outright boycotts begin. Employees are not psychologically ready to accept innovation, they are afraid of control and tightening the screws in the company. Why all? Because the CRM-system was introduced for a tick, and not for work - for example, for the CIO or CTO to receive annual bonuses for automation. Such is the corporate lobby.
What to do? Of course, in the corporate reality, directives from above are not news, and to avoid such decisions is sometimes even impractical. But in the case of the introduction of software, which will be used by everyone, the situation is different: if the staff do not support the project, they will, if not fail, then guaranteed to complicate. Therefore, implementation must be a collective decision: with justification, discussion, collection of requirements and quality gradual learning. This does not exclude the problems of adopting a new program, but each unit will have an understanding of who will use the CRM system and how.An example from life. CIO is a small but rich company decided that a CRM system is needed. First I went to SAP, then I didn’t grow together and he found a very expensive and at that time little-known imported CRM without a representative office in Russia. The guys came from Canada, presented the tops of gifts (gadgets unprecedented for 2010), implemented CRM with an English-language interface for the year. All anything, but the average age of users was 38 years, and these unfortunate saleswomen, logisticians, document specialists and supportrs from the English dictionary knew only "Made in China". The use of CRM is included in the KPI. Everyone began to lose the prize, because the training was very formal "stick there, stick here, create a request." CRM was abandoned, the staff resented. After another year of layoffs and boycotts, the security service initiated an internal investigation, the CIO was dismissed without a “golden parachute”, but with a kick - the recoil facts were revealed. By the way, in that company CRM was never implemented, everyone used a different system, remotely resembling CRM. The company did not resist absorption.
Lack of awareness and learning
Even advanced users can get into a light stupor when they first see the new interface. What to say about users with a late adaptation period? For example, the sales person used 1C to create accounts and other software he had never seen before, and suddenly a new interface appeared before him, sometimes completely different for 1C. Trivial psychology works - active resistance to everything new. Under these conditions, the worst thing you can do is to abandon vendor training or turn it into a formal lecture. An untrained employee, left to himself or to help with the program, is very likely to abandon this bad job and return to 1C or Excel. He just familiar and comfortable in them. CRM will lose all meaning.
What to do? We have already talked about how to implement a CRM system with good training, but we repeat once again the most basic, simple rules that solve most of the problems of adapting employees to a new software (not only to the CRM system).- Ask the vendor for all training materials: videos, documentation, instructions, regulations. If everything is in order with the vendor, all materials are available for free and even before implementation: for example, our documentation can be downloaded in the download section of the demo version, and readers of this article can be downloaded for a direct link , and all videos are available on Youtube - we filmed instructions on the most difficult and important "places" of RegionSoft CRM 7.0, such as KPI, currency accounting, installation. Everything is publicly available, as well as our 78 articles.
- Do not save on training. A vendor, if he has been on the market for a long time and does not give you at the mercy of any partner with non-core activities, knows exactly what to pay attention to first and foremost, what functions cause the biggest problems, so he will train professionally. Do not be afraid that the vendor will stretch the training to take more hourly pay - we also value our time, and it is often much more expensive than an hour of training :-)
- Form an internal examination. During the operation of the CRM system, there will be questions, new users, new needs - and an employee who knows the CRM system along and across will be able to quickly and competently resolve the issue.
- Do not forget about the technical support of the vendor - and preferably to the "usyo gone." Yes, priority technical support is paid, but in the first year it is a fee, including for your fast and productive work. By the way, be careful: for some vendors, the TP package is included in the software rental price, and you may not even know about it - read the contract!
CRM-system is simply not working
No, in any case, do not think that you buy a CRM and it will not suddenly start. With serious vendors, this does not happen. Four major troubles can happen here.
- Brakes the Internet in your location. For example, the Internet connection speed is set too low, which does not allow the client to communicate with the server. Another option is a long ping to the data center in the case of a web application in case the vendor chooses hosting on the basis of clear principles to it.
- Problems with DBMS. The database is the heart and brain of a CRM system, so the most stringent requirements must be placed on its capabilities. The most annoying thing is when, during the implementation of a CRM system, you learn that you additionally need to pay for the DBMS, because the basic capacity is not enough for your needs. Another example: the vendor holds a demonstration for you, everything flies, but after the start of operation, the system begins to slow down terribly, because You were shown software on an optimized demo base and advanced hardware, and not in real combat conditions.
- The need to purchase something else: email client, mailing service, the same DBMS, plug-ins and add-ons for solving seemingly the most basic tasks. You do not get the necessary functionality in your CRM-system and are forced to seek additional funds in order to begin operation in full.
- The incompatibility of the CRM system with the company's requirements is the last one in the list, but the most severe and widespread case. The company chooses a CRM system according to some of its criteria, installs / implements it, and as a result receives a system that lacks the necessary capabilities: for example, planning, KPI, warehouse management, etc. Of course, it is very inconvenient to use.
In general, it is difficult to imagine a CRM system that works in the same way as some are advertised. Our favorite promises among others are setting in an hour, starting in 15 minutes, free without limits, implementation in three days / half an hour / hour / 15 minutes, introduction without training, and a sales funnel that “conducts the client itself”. Such advertising, which has nothing to do with reality, leads to the fact that companies consider the CRM system to be unnecessary or endow it with some kind of almost magical properties, and then become frustrated.
What to do? Surprise the vendor - ask him about the technical details of the CRM-system. Do not be afraid to appear ignorant or to confuse the mail client with the mail server. You do not have to understand these details (unless, of course, you have a CIO or CTO - this is rare for small and medium businesses), but the vendor is obliged to tell you and explain all the technical details: what kind of DBMS and how much it costs, what kind of load it can withstand; what are the CRM system requirements; Is there an integrated email client and business process editor? what about telephony and so on.Examples from life. History 1. The company acquired a CRM system (rented on a SaaS model), the CRM itself was based on Oracle DBMS, its cost was included in the system cost. Interruptions started first - the vendor moved the bases to the data center in Samara, since it’s much cheaper there, but the provider turned out to be alien to SLA compliance. Then, customers were offered to pay for the use of Oracle, or buy out on-premise versions and deploy them. Should I talk about the scale of the outflow of subscribers of this CRM.
History 2. The company rents an office in a business center on the very outskirts of St. Petersburg, conduct complex sales with a warehouse and shipments throughout the CIS in huge Excel-tables. They can not use virtually any cloudy CRM, because The BC delivers monopoly Internet services, and you have to either endure dial-up speeds, or buy a USB modem and rely on not very good operator coverage. The only way out for them is the desktop CRM system . But it is better, of course, not to skimp on rent in a normal business center, because without the Internet, the possibilities of the desktop are also limited (for example, you cannot use the mail client, IP-telephony, etc.).
Approach CRM exclusively as a technical solution.
The first aspect of this approach is the expectation that the installed software will create a miracle, make sales and make a profit. The program itself will not solve anything, it is intended to be an instrument of a complex system of business processes and customer relationship strategies. Relatively speaking, if your salespeople are sitting on Facebook or Ozon all day, the marketer draws another formal SWOT analysis and holds the hundredth meeting in a month, and the customer service sends clients to the waiting mode for a week or two, CRM doesn’t do anything will, on the contrary, become an extra asset and an unjustified investment. Because yes - this is just a program: a shell, a kernel, an interface. And if you do not find ways to improve the work of employees in this program, it will be idle.
CRM-system in its essence - application software. And the hero of “Nedoroslya” Fonvizin in this case would be right if he said that once applied, it means that something needs to be attached. Namely - to apply to the general corporate efforts to develop sales and work with customers. If you want another example, CRM is a catalyst to speed up the work of complex reactions and interactions within a business.
The second aspect of a purely technical approach is to shift the issue of introducing a CRM system (from selection to operation) entirely on the shoulders of the IT department or system administrator. This is fraught with the fact that you will receive the most technically clever system with the ideal settings, which will again stand idle because it does not meet the requirements of the commercial service, marketers, support, logisticians - that is, the main users.
What to do? As we have said, to make the implementation of a collective process, create a working group and teach employees to work productively with the selected CRM system. By the way, the internal expert that we talked about above should also be from the active user groups, and not from the IT department. This way you can, among other things, avoid IT pressure on users and users' feelings of technical illiteracy, which often demotivates a lot. “So, what about the registry? Cleaned up? How not? Well, through cmd and regedit. Yes, this child knows! ”- if the article is read by people who are far from the administration, they clearly know how to cringe from these words at the first incomprehensible hangs of the PC. I recommend in response to say: "Premium? Are you not aware of the structure of payroll and retained earnings for the quarter? EBITDA and EBIT have not been calculated yet, so we are waiting for the values ​​calculated according to RAS. ”An example from life. Not about CRM, but very close. The company decided to abandon CRM, but the profile of activity assumed a large amount of information, which was accumulated in the form of records in a samopisny “type-billing”. As necessary, an IT service employee did the uploads - he created a report that the employee who had access “twisted” for the date through a primitive GUI into three lines. Short reports and orders in the format “date - data - cut” were created for special reports. Users themselves used uploaded .csv files as they needed. But the change in leadership led to the fact that the burden of determining the feasibility of the reports did not fall on the commercial director, but on the IT service. The guys in the business processes did not understand, the debugged system collapsed, and business users began to spend 50% of their work time on sound “substantial” TK that the coordinators from IT would like. The coordinators rather rudely demanded precise terminology and, for example, the line “ sales and payments for March 2017 ” turned into “ non-zero values ​​in the field sales with the presence of the payment parameter for the period 00:00:01 03/01/2017 - 23:59:59 31.03. 2017, including values ​​from the long_payments table. ” Bottom line: Commerce wasted time on drawing up the TK, IT specialists were laughing at the attempts and the result and wrapping up the TK for revision, the terms for uploading data and preparing reports were stretched for weeks. These are the bizarre forms that absolute technocracy can take in a company :-)
There are no business processes, there is business chaos
This is just the top reason for the failure of the CRM system. It's simple: if you do not have a vision of streamlined business processes in a company, you do not have a CRM strategy. Of course, in the end, 99% of companies aim to generate income, but this task can not be the goal of the business process and the implementation of CRM. This is the result of fulfilling some goals relevant to the company: increasing the customer life cycle, increasing the number of sales, increasing the average check amount, increasing market share, etc. And for such purposes, that is, under the strategy of customer relationship management (CRM), the software should be sharpened - your CRM system. If you do not know what your strategy is and there is no understanding of the processes, the implementation may turn into a drain on the budget. But if there is a vision or you are ready to review and optimize business processes, CRM will give the company resistance to external challenges, because you will have a strong foundation from a high-quality customer base, analytics and automation of routine.
What to do? Business process reengineering is where the implementation should begin. How to do this, we told in our article about business processes and implementation . If there are difficulties, connect a vendor to this work, or at least a good consultant (not to be confused with trainers and information gyms!). But I am convinced that the best way for the company is to independently understand the business processes, draw diagrams, assign stages, deadlines and responsible ones, remove all unnecessary and only then learn from the vendor to automate them in the interface of the selected CRM system. By the way, this can be done after the start of operation of the system - moreover, in many ways it is even better.Well, another immutable rule: changed the business process - immediately make changes to the CRM-system.
Patching the introduction of CRM-system: and so it will come down!
Patching the introduction of a CRM system is another big mistake. It can take different forms - let's look at a few examples with different participants.
- You have implemented a CRM system, and you need refinement (for example, special reports, custom calculator configuration within RegionSoft CRM, etc.), but for some reason you decide not to pay the vendor and do not solve these tasks on your own. Thus, the company is deprived of the opportunity to work as it is necessary or is looking for additional tools, overpaying for additional software.
- You bought a CRM-system, but decided not to deal with the settings, and you work “on minimum salary”, for example, only enter customer data. At the same time, you have telephony, mail, reports, business processes, schedulers, but you do not use any of this, preferring to use old applications. Thus, you consciously go to work with a scattered customer base and the inefficient operation of the CRM system. Well, it’s about how to buy an iPhone 10 and watch time on it, and call and write with the Nokia 3310.
These are two fairly common situations, of course there are others: unwillingness to transfer data, rare use, fragmentary input of information, etc. Moreover, this behavior does not depend on the convenience of the system, its interface, speed of operation and other parameters - the human factor prevails here.
It also happens: the CRM system begins to slip in perfectionism. The system does not start up until users configure and learn absolutely all the functions, work with the system is postponed for a long time. This situation is fraught with the fact that the work will not begin, because it is difficult to make an ideal CRM-system, without starting to fully work in it and without understanding the features in real conditions. Best practices come only through experience of use.
What to do? The best cure for patch deployment is forward and continuous implementation: complex settings (for example, integration with a virtual PBX, business process modeling) should be conducted in parallel with the start of operation, data entry and the filling of the CRM system with working entities. Firstly, it will allow to see the early effect, secondly it will reduce the payback period, and thirdly, it will greatly facilitate the perception of the CRM system by employees, since the changes will be gradual and they will not have to master all the modules and functions at once. At the same time, CRM should not be mastered exclusively “on the tops”, it is necessary to use maximum functionality, to find application for all modules. At first glance, some of the opportunities may seem superfluous, but with a more detailed approach, it becomes clear that business automation is multifaceted and more effective it is.Download the file with the concept of implementation - it will be useful to you in any case.
Download the file with the instructions for implementation .
See how to buy a powerful RegionSoft CRM with production, warehouse, KPI, planners and convenient business processes - with a 15% discount until the end of March .
Bought and forgotten
CRM was simply bought (more often - rented), but not implemented. This is a common story: many of us have paid subscriptions that we don’t use, companies regularly have a paid, but not set up or just poorly functioning corporate portal, Yandex.Direct, a blog on Habré, etc. The bills are paid, the service isn’t is used. The same thing happens with the CRM system - paid for, and, well, we’re about to start, we’re about to have a meeting and we’ll distribute our responsibilities, about to ... In fact, this is a kind of procrastination on a corporate scale.
What to do? First of all, to figure out why this happened: CRM-system is inconvenient, slow, does not provide the necessary features? And to deal with these very reasons, and then take steps to put the software into operation or replace it with a similar, but more suitable solution.Fraer's greed is overrun
Bargaining with a vendor is a great way to kill a deployment and pay twice. The vendor will agree with your amount and will go to optimize their processes, which will inevitably lead to a decrease in the quality of implementation. Open the secret: for small and medium-sized businesses, CRM is quite inexpensive, and saving an extra hundred thousand rubles can fail a cool implementation.
What to do? First of all, do not be kept on promises about a free CRM-system and CRM with a 70% discount. This is the first reason that generates the desire to save - well, why pay if it happens for free? It is important to understand that a CRM system does not always cost as much as it is written in the price list, usually the implementation costs more . Paying for the implementation of a CRM system, you invest in your business, in its qualitative development. On this, as well as on corporate security (which, by the way, includes a CRM-system), you should not save.CRM for sales only!
Looping CRM only on sales automation and using the system as a to-do list and a list for dialing is another common mistake. And it is to blame for the market in which CRM is called absolutely everything: from an electronic notebook to almost ERP. There used to be a division into SFA and CRM, and the latter was assigned the correct role of a universal tool for automating all business processes related to customers, and not just sales.
If CRM is used exclusively as a sales funnel + client base storage facility, it will turn out like this: activity is growing and even revenue is growing, but growth is extensive. And if you pay attention to the quality of staff actions, go deeper into business processes - growth will be deferred, but intense. By the way, the best option is to combine extensive use of the system with building up its potential and achieving progress (the very gradual introduction about which we wrote above).
What to do? Use the CRM-system to the fullest, and not just for sales. For example, we in the company use RegionSoft CRM for sales, marketing, advertising, technical support and, of course, development. Our customers use it as a warehouse program and logistics management system and production, etc. Once the relevant modules are provided - why not? In principle, there are very few pure CRMs left on the market for sales, so use all the opportunities provided to you and you will quickly get used to the high productivity of the automated team.He did not choose, but advised
Choosing CRM based on some very strange criteria is a pitiful path to collapse. The choice of CRM "alien mind" is very similar to the process of cheating in school: like mindlessly tore off, and good zero, one continuous harm. You must admit that it is not serious to do it to adults, and even in the most valuable and in fact vital - in your business or in your work.
In the previous post in the comments broke a revealing discussion about how in a single company approach the choice of CRM. The user Habra with enviable persistence attacked us with the question of where our comparison with competitors is, why this marketing RegionSoft is not ready to issue such a file. We expressed our position and even conceived a separate angry post on this topic, but so far we have got cold and set out the most erroneous starting points for choosing a CRM system.
- Ratings, tops, lists - complete bullshit, because everything is subjective in them, reviews are often false, and the top places are successfully bought.
- Analytical reports are not bad expert tops (Gartner, Forrester), but they rarely have CRM systems that are suitable for the price and functionality of Russian small and medium businesses.
- Someone else's opinion on social networks - probably does not need comments, but we managed to delve into these many-sided opinions . If you are too lazy to follow the link, then briefly: do you still believe in the pluralism of opinions on social networks?
- , — . , ,
«» « , ».
What to do? To be guided by your company's requirements for the CRM system, choose it yourself, test demo versions, do not go for advertising promises and brand, pay attention to the vendor’s professionalism. In general, the key decisions for businesses to make their smart, cold and sober head.By the end of this post, we failed to implement it ten times, and it has not been said that the cause of the fiasco is often the lack of leadership and top managers, the corruption of department heads, the formal attitude to work, internal corporate conflicts, the vendor's fragility (more often - partners, which he is gaining anyhow, without evaluating the expertise) and even the economic situation in the country.
So, since it is so scary, maybe not to introduce? Of course not.On the contrary, arm yourself with information and implement CRM in a way that your competitors cannot do. Speaking very simply, CRM should solve two tasks: to facilitate the work of managers and to ensure transparency of operations for managers. These tasks benefit each employee of the organization, directly help to get even with the routine and start earning more. Yes, the introduction of CRM - this is not "15 minutes", it is a painstaking and thorough process, but this is the case when the game is worth the candle.
We have an action “Spring. Spread our wings! ”- discounts on all the software of our own development by RegionSoft Developer Studio, including our flagship RegionSoft CRM in all editions (CRM for small and medium businesses).
Our channel in Telegram , in which without advertising we write not quite formal things about CRM and business.Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/444142/
All Articles