Customer Relationship management (CRM) Software is an excellent tool to manage company’s customer-related date and streamline the work process. Organizations across the world are investing relentlessly to get the best out of it.

Yet, getting a positive ROI takes a little more time than usual if your internal workforce is reluctant of using CRM or forgetting to regularly update the customer-centric information. That’s something dreadful, indeed. So, what should companies do to fetch a great return from CRM software? Here’re top 6 tips, recommended by sales automation experts, on improving company’s CRM software.

How to improve the design of a CRM software?

Make the software easy-to-use for in-house employees:

Before purchasing a hi-tech CRM software, learn what your employees and staffs are expecting out of it. Ask each one of them and then, evaluate their requirements and feedbacks. It will help you customize your CRM software as per the needs of your end-users. If you skimp on this part, adoption of CRM within your corporate premise is going to be difficult.

Also, don’t forget that not everyone logs into the system regularly or work at the headquarters. There’re some field people, as well. So, if you use abbreviated terms in the software, it may not make sense to the field representatives. That’s why it’s important to make the design in a way that supports all the end-users.

Train all employees on how to use CRM software:

Your purchase is going to be a new installation for your employees. It may puzzle or bewilder the internal staffs if not trained properly. You can’t really expect everyone to learn from YouTube tutorial or the manual provided with the software. Hands-on training is essential for the employees, so that they understand all the nitty-gritty of this software.

If you have a bigger manpower or you are not able to train everyone at the same time, here’s a suggestion for you. Train the tech savvy or eager-to-learn employees, first. Once they get hold of CRM’s implementation, ask them to train their colleagues on the best utilization of CRM software.

Ask your sales reps to track customer behavior:

CRM focuses on your customers, so the software should be optimized based on customer data. Tell your sales representatives to gather data throughout the sales cycle. In association with them, try to identify your prospect clients on social media, what are the channels they are following, and through which channel they share the most of their information.

Once these data are collected, the sales people must identify which content or product resonates most on the platforms, which pieces of content has gone viral or welcoming huge engagement, where the traffics are clicking, what type of devices they are using and so on. With this information in your hand, you can predict the future needs of your clients, plan the next approach, and hone your content accordingly.

Don’t consider CRM as an individual sales automation system:

Often, companies think or use this software as a standalone system for sales. With this mindset, these organizations keep all the departments, other than sales, out of this loop. That is, the access to CRM software gets limited only to the sales representatives. Therefore, the firms fail to integrate properly their CRM with other client-informing or client-facing systems.

For example, if you drop your service desk from CRM software, then your frontline employees won’t be aware of the recent changes made to the customers’ status. And as a result, they don’t get enough opportunities to interact and build strong relationships with the clients.

Integrate your CRM in a way that everything is in sync:

the CRM software that you are going to install must sync automatically with your company’s calendar. That is, it should import all due dates of client meetings, social media postings, upcoming trade fair, business meets, product deliveries, AMC and much more. If you don’t sync your CRM, you may have to do these manually or keep a tab of everything in your mind. Then you can’t really assure that nothing will ever skip your mind. To avoid the hassles later, be prepared from the day of installation.

Founder and CEO of AffinityLive says, “A good CRM system should allow you to schedule an appointment with a client from Outlook, your Google Calendar or your smartphone calendar, send the client an invite and know that your CRM has made a note and record about this client event.”

Your CRM must have update on each and every data: Consistently updating and managing customer data is not possible until you shift to an automated system. It’s really difficult to compel all your sales representatives to manually insert all customer-oriented data, every time when they are working on a deal. The whole process becomes exhausting and frustrating. Well, make a shift to CRM. This tool allows you to house all data inside it. Further, CRM prevents data duplication and redundancy. Appending and cleaning of data with updated firmographic variables is possible through CRM. You can also keep the email addresses clean and flagged when the status shows invalid. Overall, it seems that only with a little investment, you can escape the exhaustion and chances of mistakes.

The design of a CRM software always has a scope of improvement. Ask the developers to customize it according to your needs to maximize the end-results. You should opt for the software development company that follows Agile Methodology. In this way, you can keep a tab of every phase of the development. And, the final result will be more than amazing!