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Aligning business processes, managing costs, and designing for success
There are many CRM platforms available on the market. Once a company selects its preferred platform, the next step is to tailor it to fit their specific needs.
Your CRM system should support your business processes, not the other way around.
The more tailored a solution, the higher the costs and time investment. This is likely why a company opts for a CRM platform instead of designing a custom solution from scratch.
System integrators provide valuable guidance during CRM implementation, helping navigate decisions around cost, ROI, and system design. They outline the benefits of process automation and data analysis while tailoring solutions to align with your business and maintenance goals. Whether continuing with integrator support or taking ownership, they ensure the system remains scalable and manageable, highlighting how customizations may impact long-term maintainability.
Data availability and quality are essential. Therefore, addressing the data model is one of the first implementation tasks.
A crucial consideration is how closely the data model should reflect reality. For instance, in a CRM, if you want to track customer contacts and their respective roles, you have several options:
Decide if each contact has one role or multiple roles (can they wear multiple hats?).
Determine if a contact can be associated with multiple companies (can a contact be associated to multiple subsidiaries in the same group?).
Choose whether the role should be a property of the contact or specific to a given contact for a particular company (can a contact have a role in one subsidiary and another one in a different subsidiary?).
Each option varies in complexity and flexibility, impacting also the user experience during data entry.
In our experience, choosing a data model that closely mirrors reality is safer. Otherwise, real-world data may eventually conflict with your data model, necessitating workarounds to fit data in simplified data model. Referring to the examples above, you might need to duplicate a contact working for multiple companies or to track only the primary role of an individual.
These decisions affect data quality, an impact that can be assessed with your system integrator.
Redundancy often arises from user experience considerations. For instance, suppose you CRM is tracking customers and their purchase orders in your CRM, and that purchase order have multiple lines, one for each sold product.
Such data model provides definitely report capabilities on Customers and Products, but there may not provide an operational view of the products purchased by each customer. To offer this feature, you may need to add redundancy by creating a direct relationship between customers and products.
Redundancy is the enemy of data consistency, that in this scenario needs to be well designed and maintained.
Sometimes, additional relationships in your data model, which seem redundant initially, can help track extra information. For example, let’s take a Business where products are so complex that each of them has a dedicated sales manager. The system tracks this information at the product level. With this data model, the system may only show the current responsible sales manager for a given product. Adding a new relationship can track the sales manager responsible for the product at the time of sale, enhancing historical data accuracy.
A system integrator can also help design a CRM system that aligns with your maintenance goals. You must decide whether, after the initial implementation, to continue leveraging your system integrator for support and evolution or take partial or full ownership of the system. If you choose the latter, consider the effort and skillset you intend to dedicate to manage your CRM solution. Your system integrator can design the solution with this in mind, informing you when customizations may impact maintainability beyond your original expectations.
Implementing a CRM system is a significant step for any company, providing benefits such as process automation and enhanced data analysis. However, it requires careful planning and consideration of various factors, including alignment with business processes, cost and flexibility trade-offs, data model design, and system maintainability. Working with an experienced system integrator can help navigate these complexities, ensuring that your CRM solution not only meets your current needs but is also scalable and maintainable for the future. By following these best practices, you can maximize the value of your CRM investment and support the long-term success of your business.