CRM Requirements List

Your CRM requirements list is an important part of choosing your CRM software.

Start with gathering a wish list of ideas from your sales, marketing, customer service departments, as well as your managment team. When you outline your needs and goals, translate those into a firm list of key criteria. It is better to have a step by step process than to except all of your CRM criteria to be accomplished at once. To identify your top CRM requirements, gather the insights into the expectations of your customers, your company, and the needs of your sales, marketing and service staff.

What are the primary business drivers?
You can most accurately discover and prioritize your CRM requirements by understanding what problems your are trying to solve, what processes you are trying to improve.

Who are your primary stakeholders?
Involving your core user base in project planning can help you more clearly determine your requirements. Knowing how the members of your sales, marketing and service teams interact with customers as well as the challenges they most often face help you map out the tools they'll need to perform their jobs more effectively.

What changes have clients requested, and which ones will have the most positive impact with them?
Remember that CRM is really all about gaining market share and improving satisfaction among your customer base.

What are the critical succss factors and how do they need to be measured?
The ability to analyze and assess the success or failure of a CRM initiative through the use of reports and dashboards is a must have on the CRM requirement list.

Do you anticipate any changes in the future?
Your CRM requirements should not only address your short-term needs, but your long-term plans as well.

Do you want a hosted or on-premise solution?
Hosted CRM solutions and on-premise CRM solutions are options for many companies. Determine which benefits your business for a CRM solution to grow into.

Data is as Important as CRM Software

Your data is as important as your CRM software. Accurate data helps improve a companies CRM strategy. Even the most cutting edge technology can not satisfy users if the data is not clean and accurate.

The number of personnel changes, address changes, company acquisitions along with customer records with missing or incorrect information means a whole lot of bad data.

There are many ways to improve this situation. Forward-thinking companies appoint a customer data individual who is reponsible for data management and data quality. This person's only job is to check records and clean them up. Calling and verifying data is extremely important for sales and customer service departments.

Also, whenever user contacts a person, they must make sure their data is accurate. This is a simple way to correct data while the client is on the phone. Typical tasks might include determining data security measures and working to resolve data integrity issues. Some companies even tie in incentives to the integrity of the data - the higher the data quality, the more the individual is compensated.

These small steps can mean big change and profits for the company who is using CRM software.

Customizing your CRM Solution

Choose a CRM solution that allows you to modify the application to fit your company's wants and needs in a convenient environment. There are a few things to take into consideration when contemplating CRM software customizations. When a company is in the middle of a CRM implementation, it is important to know that there is no definite answer when it comes to CRM customization. Your decision will be based on a multitude of factors and the different levels of customizations can vary from one company to the next.

The flexibility needed to meet a company's specific requirements depends on the company. CRM solution can allow your to change existing screens or develop your own. Adding, changing or deleting fields, tabs, screens, toolbards, tree control should all be done quickly and easily. Business logic can also be incorporated into CRM applications. Incorporate workflow, events, screen prompts and logic to your application to create prompts to guide users through the process of entering or updating required information.

Conduct a needs assessment to determine how much customization is actually needed. Make sure to include any and all departments in this decision making process. Take into consideration all objectives and workflows. Map those to the functionality within your CRM software.