Use this CRM scope checklist to ensure your CRM software covers your functional needs and will provide a synchronised view of your business performance.
What can CRM software do for your business? What is the scope of CRM?
Traditionally and essentially CRM is management software for sales, marketing and customer service teams as they are the major touchpoints for any customer contact strategy.
CRM for sales management
A good mobile enabled CRM will allow sales reps to manage their tasks, activities and meetings from wherever they are, reducing unwanted administration time and building in best practice into prospect management.
Sales managers who need real time transparency in reviewing their team’s sales pipeline and KPIs can do so with the use of configurable CRM dashboards.
When reviewing CRM choices the sales functionality should cover the basics of:
- Salesforce and pipeline management
- Lead, contact and prospect management
CRM for marketing
CRM can provide both marketing and sales functionality within their own operational requirements; but should also enable better collaboration and transparency between teams; putting the lead, prospect and customer at the heart of the CRM strategy.
Marketing teams can be supported in lead generation efforts, planning and executing multi-channel marketing campaigns, segment audiences, deliver targeted messaging at the right time, analyse marketing spend ROI and carry out best practice testing efficiently.
Marketing functionality within a CRM system review should include:
- Multi-channel marketing campaign management
- Database management
- Social media engagement
CRM for customer service
Customer service teams need to be able to deliver a positive customer experience and to do this they need to be supported by a CRM system that gives them a good record of past customer contacts, support enquiries, technical incidents and product history.
Customer service operators need to handle calls, emails and social/web enquiries quickly and to the satisfaction of the customer; but also keeping to service KPIs such as response times, resolution percentages and SLA adherence.
A CRM system should provide a 360 degree view of the customer and support operatives with information they need at their fingertips so they can resolve issues and handle queries efficiently.
When considering CRM functionality for customer service, organisations should review:
- Customer service and contact management
- Knowledge sharing and document management
- Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
- SLA and contract management
- Social listening integration
What is xRM?
In addition to those three core customer contact functions, CRM functionality is evolving to encompass other lines of business or simply extending its reach across teams to drive productivity and efficiency.
Some examples of this additional CRM functionality includes:
- Products, pricing and catalogue management
- Project and contract management for professional services
- Human resource management
- Service and field engineer management
CRM for business intelligence
A CRM dashboard provides managers with an "at a glance" snapshot of company performance and the various functions in one place. Because of the reach of CRM, it can illustrate business intelligence in the areas of individual and team performance against KPIs, customer engagement and retention, support levels, audience profiling, sales pipeline, profitability, customer trends and product analysis.
By bringing data collected together, a CRM will help in swift and informed decision making and surface information easily via alerts or traffic light systems so that management can identify issues or bottlenecks and more importantly resolve them in order to drive the business forward.
When reviewing the business intelligence (BI) functionality within your CRM shortlist, you will need to cover the above CRM reporting capabilities and also ask about the future capabilities of BI for CRM, such as predictive analytics, big data or embedded BI.