What are the CRM system limitations? To know more about these, just keep on reading the article until the end.
CRM System Limitations – Overview
The customer relationship management (CRM) system is a database management system that captures and maintains information about the customer, to help the company to develop better business relationships with customers. These CRM systems are also used for additional tasks such as sales/marketing, advertising/promotion, support, services, and marketing research.
These CRM systems are also used in many companies in various fields. Usually, the most common fields are:
- Banking Industry
- Insurance Industry
- BPO / Call center industry
- Retail industry
- Health care industry
To use the information stored on these CRM systems, special software applications should be installed. Also, the main goal of these software applications is to access the data in the CRM system. These applications are called CRM-based software.
Because these CRM systems are used in various fields, they are made with specific requirements, depending on their environment and the business rules. This leads to a variety of limitations and restrictions. Some of these limitations and restrictions are due to the business needs, some of them are due to specific systems/applications, some of them are due to the implementation decisions, and some of them are due to the database structure.
CRM System Limitations
This article will discuss the most common limitations and restrictions that can be found on CRM systems.
1. Data Model Limitations
CRM data models should be designed according to business needs and rules. Therefore, there is a lack of standardization between CRM data models. This makes it difficult for vendors to develop generic multi-vendor applications that access various CRM systems.
2. Security Model Limitations
Each business has its security model with different roles such as manager, agent/representative, etc., in addition to custom privileges for each role such as access permission for specific functions or reports. Therefore, it is difficult for a third-party vendor to develop a generic application that can access multiple CRM systems and can use all features available in these systems without any restrictions or limitations.
3. Session Management Limitations
Each business has its policies regarding user sessions and session timeouts. User sessions must be managed correctly by the application so that users do not get logged out when they don’t expect it (e.g., after 5 minutes). A good session management policy includes:
- Browser-based session management such as IE, Firefox, Safari;
- Time-based session management;
- Idle-based session management;
- A session timeout policy.
Most of these policies cannot be managed by a generic CRM-based application. Therefore, the application should be able to manage user sessions according to the business needs. This may require special programming for each CRM system.
4. Workflow Management Limitations
Workflow management limitationsWorkflow management is an important part of many CRM systems. The workflow process is used to automate repetitive tasks that should happen automatically in the background. Also, the most common example of a workflow process is an approval process for a purchase order or service request etc.
During the workflow process, the user may be required to perform several tasks. For example, a purchase order may need the approval of a small purchase and the large purchase manager. In addition, the user may be required to fill in some fields such as item number, amount, etc., depending on the rules that are defined in the workflow process.
