The most important features your CRM system should have

Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system is no easy task. There are a multitude of requirements that companies need to consider in the process. But especially in our fast-paced, digital times, when customer experience has become one of the most important success factors for companies, it pays to establish a powerful CRM system. This enables companies to optimize the customer experience with the help of coordinated actions and offers and to map the customer journey holistically.

Seamless integration into the rest of the system landscape

The key aspects that a CRM system should have include seamless integration into existing processes and the existing system landscape, as well as up-to-date, intuitive usability. Such features increase the likelihood that users from marketing, sales, and service will accept the CRM system and enjoy using it, because they work more productively with it and operate optimized customer and service management. But it is not only the business departments that benefit from a clean integration of CRM. IT also appreciates the advantages of homogeneous systems and standardized end-to-end processes.

The importance of integration is best illustrated by the interaction between the CRM system and the SAP ERP system or SAP S/4HANA. The ERP system handles a large number of business processes in the company – from purchasing and sales to logistics and finance. The connection of the CRM system ensures holistic processes and real-time access to information. This includes, for example, the synchronization of master and transaction data, which breaks down data silos, avoids duplicate data maintenance and increases data quality. Companies should take advantage of the opportunity presented by the introduction of a CRM system to standardize processes and systems and thus also maintenance efforts.

Uncomplicated access to historical data

The individual interactions of a customer with a company result in an extensive customer history, which includes correspondence, quotations, orders and purchase orders. Uncomplicated access to this historical data facilitates the daily work of marketing, sales and service. An integrated CRM approach also helps in this regard. The system is linked to Microsoft Outlook, so appointments and correspondence are automatically linked in the CRM. The addresses of customers and contact persons are also stored centrally there. The data records are directly linked to the ERP system, so that quotations and orders from the CRM also end up in the ERP and, conversely, historical data can be viewed. The same applies to deliveries and invoices. Such integration scenarios have an extremely positive effect on the acceptance of the CRM system, the throughput time of the processes and customer satisfaction.

Uniform reporting without system breaks

In sales and service, interdepartmental collaboration is a key factor in determining the quality of results. Customer service transfers inquiries from the service desk to scheduling or to spare parts sales. In many companies, these transfers are analogous or run with isolated tools, which makes tracking and uniform reporting difficult. In an integrated system, the system breaks between the departments are reduced to a minimum. At best, all process steps even take place within one system. This enables transparent insight into the status of tasks, offers, requests and tickets. Working together creates transparency about who is involved in an issue and who is responsible for it. In addition, the effort required for reporting is reduced, while its quality increases.

A CRM system should contain standard industry processes that can be adapted to company-specific conditions by means of customizing. Standard processes such as lead and opportunity management, the creation of offers or the control of activities run identically in most companies and accordingly offer no potential for competitive advantages. However, if they are managed efficiently, costs can be saved.

On-premise or from the cloud?

In addition, companies need to make a decision on deployment: should the new CRM software run in the cloud or in the company’s own data center? In addition to IT-related arguments such as operating costs and maintenance effort, the general corporate strategy and the needs of customers and users should also be considered in the decision. If the CRM system is to be rolled out worldwide, if sales and service staff need mobile access, if the system is to be opened up to third parties as a platform, or if it is to be scalable according to need, these are strong arguments in favor of a cloud CRM system.

Closely related to the question of deployment are the issues of updates and support. While updates to on-premise software, especially in the SAP world, have to be planned for a long time and downtimes are required for the import, it is much easier with cloud solutions thanks to automatic updates. Companies receive access to new functionalities at regular intervals without having to become active. Such updates include improvements and bug fixes as well as innovations.

Conclusion: Fit for the present and ready for the future

In view of increasingly heterogeneous IT landscapes, the great importance of the interaction between the CRM system and the other systems for the success of CRM projects is hardly surprising. In fact, in many cases the question of integration is not only the biggest cost factor, but also the most frequent cause of delays. The technologies used, in combination with ready-made, field-tested building blocks, determine how reliably system integration works and how high the costs are to implement and maintain the integration.

In addition, companies would do well not only to keep an eye on current requirements, but also to think about tomorrow. If more customers and partners are to be involved in the sales and service process in the future, it makes sense to open up the CRM system as a platform through which those involved can exchange information. Typical examples are customer portals for services or partner portals for joint work on sales-related topics. In the context of service 4.0, intelligent machines and the Internet of Things (IoT) play a role. The CRM system should therefore not only map today’s processes, but also form the basis for how the company will do business in the future.