How to Make Your CRM More Usable

Organizations often believe the solution to increase productivity and better efficiency is the implementation of a CRM system that allows sales reps to effortlessly organize and store data about their customers.

At the same time, organizations find it difficult to get their users to adopt and seamlessly use the systems due to their complexity and sophistication. It is reported that 74% of organizations have poor CRM adoption rates.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Avon Products canceled a $125 million order of management software after sales representatives found it to be “burdensome and disruptive”.

To increase user adoption rates and a seamless user experience, the following factors should be considered as part of your CRM selection process.

 1. Faster System allows for Improved Customer Relations

An average sale rep spends 65% of their time working on things unrelated to selling, one of which is organizing and entering customer’s information into a database. If the user has to wait too long for information to load or to be processed, this consequently results in a hindrance of ease to CRM usability. As sales reps are often paid by the number of sales they close, they are not tolerant to spending extra time on slow system performance. The faster the speed of the system, the less time the user spends on entering data and the more they spend on pitching clients.

 2. Integration Between Email and CRM

Majority of customer interactions take place within our inboxes, thus integration between email and CRM would make it easier to achieve CRM usability. For example, Cirrus Insight is a software that fully integrates Salesforce and Gmail. This gives sales rep the ease to create and update contacts right from Gmail and associate sent and receive emails to CRM records. With this integration, an increase in value of adopting CRM becomes apparent because sales rep can now simultaneously open emails and respond to their customers. The average sale rep can free up to more than an extra hour a day by streamlining workflows and eliminating the need to leave their inbox and open up their CRM software. This allows them to truly focus on what is important as a sales rep and that is closing sales.

 3. Consistent Upgrades and Updates Must Occur Subtly and Logically

With constant upgrades and updates to software and systems, it is important that each new version and update happens in a subtle manner. Big changes in how users perform certain day to day function can be disturbing and disruptive to CRM usability. Learning and adopting a new software may be tolerable the first time around, but if sales reps constantly have to focus their energy on learning new CRM systems, they may resent and protest it. However, it is also important that small adjustments based on user feedback and experience are also made to solve the small problems before they become large time consuming problems. The key is to make them consistent and not drastic so that users understand the system making CRM more usable.

4. Stop the Error Messages

When big error messages pop up from nowhere, it disrupts the user experience especially when the user is performing what seems to be a routine function. Less bugs and fewer error messages makes a CRM system more usable.

 Conclusion:

All in all, a more usable CRM helps to boost your organization’s productivity, increase sales and betters efficiency, which in the long run brings in more revenue and profit.