Key Questions IT Leaders Must Ask of a CRM Platform

IT professionals have their work cut out for them- it is not simple to strike a balance between minimizing expenses, maximizing the value of existing technology, and investing in the business future’s strategic tools. As organizations contend for brand loyalty and invest more in giving excellent client experiences, there is a greater emphasis on leaders to handle the consumer data siloed across multiple systems, applications, and engagement channels.

It has been observed that presently more than 2.6 quintillion bytes of data are generated each day, and it is expected that 1.8MB of data will be generated each second per person. This data includes complete visibility about your clients, such as who they are, what they like/dislike, their objectives, and how they engage with your business.

Building real business value from client data brings much pressure on the consumer experience platform. It should connect all the client data to deliver insights about the entire client experience, and also, it must fit the specific requirements of the industry and unique business.

When the IT professionals are deciding what they need of a robust CRM software, below are the essential questions they must ask.

1. Managing Data: Is it easy to bring client data together?

Capturing the whole client experience indicates connecting all channels and tools that consumers leverage to engage with the brand. This means any interaction involving marketing, sales, support, social media, and much more. It can be daunting to bring all the data together when it is stored in various different formats or siloed in multiple cloud environments.

This burden of connecting client data falls on the developers, who are forced to learn modern proprietary programming languages and APIs. To receive the complete view on customers, a cloud-based customer relationship management solution requires being open enough to connect to any tool or data source that an organization uses. Most flexible solutions use open standards so that developers can leverage the technologies and skills they are familiar with.

A CRM tool, which can bring client data together easily, must:

1. Seamlessly fit with the rest of the business architecture
2. Be open and capable of connecting to a platform or external software
3. Provide developers the flexibility to share and store data in any format and use open standards.

2. Customization: How to customize the CRM platform to the unique business requirements

Beyond considering the inevitable transformation, which comes with development, introducing modern business models and ways of engaging clients will need customizing the way your technology functions. Unfortunately, some CRM apps force companies to model client relationships, as per the traditional models of engagement that are not suitable for particular organizations or industries. The part of generating an excellent client experience is developing relationships that fit the entire ecosystem of staff, vendors, partners, and all the products/services.

A customizable CRM software must:

1. Expand to support extra use cases and new operations easily
2. Focus on client experience by providing frictionless and personalized experiences for workers and consumers alike
3. Support channels, data, applications, and rules unique to the organization and industry

3. Agility: Does the application enable the business to scale while staying agile

As the business evolves, IT professionals must strategically think about the internal procedures and business rules, which house new client-facing teams, products/services. It needs introducing new business tools to manage specific requirements and is outgrown within 12 to 24 months.

Multiple CRM apps are non-flexible to the constant transformation in business needs. They often require the recruiting of costly developer resources, consultants, and the changes can take a few months to deploy.

In order to keep a business agile when it scales, a CRM application must:

1. Be future-proof to the point where the developers can test out innovative, new points solutions without extensive disruption
2. Can accommodate existing technical knowledge within the company without forcing staff to learn new things

4. Measure and Analyze: How to measure the effect of technology on client experience

The technology that IT professionals select to invest in must allow thoughtful support, proper selling, and engagement that clients expect. Gauging technological success includes looking at the ROI and the level details offered in the customer experience metrics, and how the data can be shared within the organization.

An online CRM system, which depends on old client analytics tools, can be at risk as many of them do not support visibility for operational effectiveness or initiatives, such as self-service. Companies that cannot measure and compare the details of the CX may lag in their respective fields.

Hence, understanding the technology impacts that as client experiences signifies that a CRM app must be able to:

• Bring the data together for maximum client insights across major functions.
• Support innovative UI-driven analytics, related to initiatives such as AI and self-service.
• Compete with the business best practices for a goal and look at how the business is performing.