If you’ve ever thought about the implementation of CRM for your business, then in your research, you must have come across the challenges that companies face in order to implement CRM successfully. Most companies find it difficult to influence their employees to leverage the benefits of CRM. Therefore, CRM adoption becomes a big challenge for most companies. Moreover, low adoption rates is one of the most prominent reasons why CRM projects fail. So, this calls for a seamless strategy to drive the usage and thereby increasing the CRM adoption rates.
CRM adoption can be a bit tricky. However, by the end of this article, you will be able to figure out an insightful approach to overcome the hurdle of low CRM adoption rates.
Set a Target
The target of 100 percent CRM usage is not an easy task. Depending on the size of the company, it is completely normal that the companies might take some weeks or months to achieve the target of 100 percent usage from the day when the rollout begins. So, it becomes very crucial for the companies to set a target defining the timeline in which they are expecting 100 percent usage. This will help the companies to determine the efforts and manpower required to achieve the desired adoption rates. Moreover, after figuring out the timeline, it’s always a good idea for big companies to start introducing the CRM system in a phase-wise manner.
Involvement Results in Encouragement
Inevitably, it will be the people of your company, who will make the CRM implementation a great success for you. Therefore, it becomes imperative to involve them in the CRM project implementation. Identify the problems that they are facing currently without CRM or with the existing CRM and make sure that the new CRM is solving those problems. Also, in the implementation phase, keep taking regular feedback from the employees so that the necessary changes can be done on a timely basis. After being involved in the CRM in this manner, the employees will feel more encouraged and motivated to use the CRM software that you are implementing.
Personalized User Experience
Naturally, human beings are hardwired to resist changes. Based on this fact, the people of your company will be very much accustomed to the current tools and processes of your company. Introducing a new CRM will naturally induce resistance in most individuals. However, you can make this transformation easy for them by identifying the scope of customization in the CRM. Using the familiar terminologies and enabling the workflows that your employees are accustomed to will help the employees in switching to the CRM quite easily. Also, look for the scope of integration of the new CRM with the other existing tools used by the employees in your company.
Effective Training
Since your people will be completely new to the CRM, the need for proper training must never be ruled out. Knowledge issue is one of the most common CRM adoption challenges and effective training will surely help you to overcome it. Also, it must be ensured that the training material in the form of videos, user manuals, SOPs, etc. should be always accessible to the employees.
CRM Brand Ambassador
In order to influence people to use the CRM software, it’s always a good idea to select a group of people within the company who will act as the brand ambassadors for the CRM. At least, one CRM ambassador in every team/department will help to drive the usage in their particular team/department. Also, this CRM ambassador will serve as a point of contact to the employees for any CRM-related queries and feedbacks.
Rewards and Fun
The results are always better when the fun is mixed with work. You can organize team-wise competitions related to CRM user adoption. Also, based on your company’s background you can award people based on the data and insight received from the CRM tools. Moreover, in centivization will also encourage the employees to switch to the new CRM software completely.
A proper strategy followed by exemplary execution is all it takes to overcome the challenge of low CRM adoption rates. Our team of experts at CRM Masters has a history of helping companies overcome this challenge of low adoption. We work closely across the departments of your company to achieve the desired usage goals within the targeted timelines.
Feel free to get in touch with us for any CRM-related queries.