The Best CRM Tools You Can Have in Your Business

You want to implement a CRM as you know it will help your team to save time and your company will gain in productivity. They are clear benefits and real business values but you’re facing a slow user adoption and you don’t know how to show the added-values to your colleagues. 

Let’s face it, nobody likes change. It’s human nature that makes end-users resistant to change. With this article, we’ll try to give you some best practices in order to decrease your chance of CRM implementation failure.

How to increase CRM User Adoption?

The main advice is to understand that user adoption in CRM is about changing user behaviours and not about technology. It means that your IT guys who are implementing your CRM are not always the right (or at least the only) ambassadors and you may involve your management team. If you get this first principle the examples below will look obvious and easy to settle.

Here are some best practices to increase CRM Adoption Rates.

Create strategy and change management.

You should define clearly and properly your business objective. Then you should think "How will I reach them?". In this sense, your CRM strategy needs to describe a clear vision and should contain a roadmap. Then, this strategy has to align with how the new CRM software supports the company's business strategy. Finally, you should measure your plan of action. An example of the strategy measurement can be done with the SMART goals:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Actionable
4. Realisable
5. Time-bound

Create a clear Change Management Plan which includes your top management with clear and well-defined communication tools including a solid business case which everybody can understand for example.
 

Involve users.

Select the right team who will deliver your plan and explain to the other colleagues your business objectives. Why would you do this? Here are 3 main reasons:
 

1. They will give you feedback and help you to readjust your strategy if it’s required
2. These users will involve the others and implement your strategy in their departments
3. You will reduce uncertainty, misunderstanding and promote support for your strategy among these users
    

Choose a CRM ambassador to improve CRM user adoption.

This person should be a link between you and the employees. He or she could give guidelines to others. Then when you will need it, this person will be able to create a workgroup to come up with best practices and document the results. Of course, this person needs to be an expert in the system, and have a certain authority in the company to be able to carry out the CRM initiative.
 

Easy to use.

Remember, you want to implement a CRM as you know it will help your team to save time and your company will gain in productivity.

Then the CRM should make life easier for the users, not harder. The person who implements your CRM should adapt the solutions to the users and not to his or her way of using the CRM. Put easy interfaces and easy to find a document and relieve unnecessary processes which can lead to more confusion and ultimately non-usage of the CRM.
 

Train your employees.

With efficy we have seen that “Customers who invest in training report more than 50% ROI on their efficy investment.”

It’s important to train properly and differently to your employees. A marketer will need to focus on how to create email campaigns and how to do follow-up leads where Administrators should also learn how to configure the solution and other administrator-related tasks.

At efficy, we have created the “efficy Diving Academy”. It presents a broad array of training sessions to empower your people with the skills and knowledge they need to get the most of efficy CRM.

Reward users.

Review how your employees have used the CRM system and think about rewarding those who use it well. The reward system is a great way to get everyone moving in the same direction. You could, for example, use the gamification as we do with efficy to reward them. At efficy, we use it to boost your sales team but it could easily be adapted to increase the use of the CRM or at least reward people who use it a lot.
 

Conclusion, do not underestimate the CRM user adoption during implementation.

Implementing a CRM is not easy and it does take time and resources. Slow user adoption is a top cited contributing factor to CRM engagements that fail to achieve their objectives.

In the meantime, if you create a strong strategy and include the right people to implement your solution it will be a success!
 

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Learn more: 

CRM Meaning. What is CRM ? 
What is the best CRM for your business? 
CRM : 5 examples of companies using Customer Relationship Software 
Why should you use a CRM insurance for your company? 
How to write an effective and successful business plan