6 Rules for CRM User Adoption « CRM Software Blog

This is a great post- similar to something I wrote some time back.

 

6 Rules for CRM User Adoption « CRM Software Blog.

Do you audit your CRM deployment?

So you are done and happy about your CRM implementation? The implementation you think has gone successfully and the users are thrilled to bits?  But here are some red flags you could look for to improve the usage. Remember, an overwhelming one third of CRM deployments fail because of poor user adoption. You could do some quick reference checks and figure out if your CRM needs a revision.  Here is an audit chart you could use.

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What percentage of users use the CRM fewer than 25 hours a month? 20% 40% 60% >75%

Has the number of calls made by the leadgen team improved Month on Month? Yes

No; it has declined

Remains same

Has the number of leads increased Yes

No; it has declined

Remains same

Has the lead conversion improved?

Has the sales cycle become shorter? Yes; or remains same

No; it has become longer

Are majority of your sales people sworn by the CRM?

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I don’t think it is relevant to see if you get 3 out of 5 or 4 out of 5 as a score. It depends on where you started. If you started with no CRM, even 2 is a good score. This is just a sample sheet. You should be able to generate a questionnaire depending on the areas of CRM you have implemented. These include:

1. E-mail marketing
2. Telemarketing
3. Outsurced Lead Generation
4. Sales Process Management
5. Pipeline Forecast
6. Customer Service
7. Customer Feedback

If you need any help, please feel free to fill up the form and mail us. We shall be happy to do an audit and make recommendations to make your CRM deliver more for you. We are offering limited auditing via internet/phone free till June 30, 2012. 

Government presence in Social Media on the rise

Possibly the US President Barack Obama (Twitter Handle @barackobama) and then Indian Junior Minister for external affairs Shashi Tharoor (@shashitharoor) were among the earliest adopters of social media in the political world. They were able to communicate with their constituencies without any intermediaries. Since then, host of personalities from various walks of life have come and gone or just got bored of the social media. It has also been a cause for some charlatans to post as  real people. It can be funny too when the posts are in third person, like when the supposed tweet from the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh  reads ” @PMOIndia Dr Manmohan Singh

The Prime Minister undertook 22 domestic and 10 foreign trips last year. pic.twitter.com/cSH8vg2m“.

The use of social media from just individuals has moved to Government Agencies. This is not a blog with social media adoption statistics among government agencies.

Here are some agencies who interact meaningfully with the citizens.

Rank #3 : Commissioner, Brihat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike – @bbmpcommissioner

BBMP is a large, complex administrative body which is involved in every walk of life of a citizen- roads, water, land administration, tax collection and garbage disposal. Notoriously inefficient, the only thing they have streamlined and managed efficiently to date is tax collection. You can pay your city taxes using a credit card or through your bank account. The commissioner, has started this initiative to get complaints and feedback from citizens of Bangalore. We have not seen any responses or resolutions from him yet, but he will get enough and more feedback on the civic conditions across this ever growing city.

Rank #2 : Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation

Twitter: @KSRTC_Journeys

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KSRTC.Karnataka

KSRTC is one of the best public transport systems in India. They have a modern fleet with a wide range of buses from shuttle services to super luxury, interstate coaches from Volvo and Mercedes. They have in many ways revolutionised overnight travel by reducing the travel time between major cities. They have regular twitter and facebook updates about newer bus terminus’s, newer routes, changed travel times and they also update you by way of SMS if there is any change in the time of your forthcoming travel with KSRTC.

They have smartly embedded their travel planner into their Facebook page so that you can book your tickets right within Facebook.

Rank #1 : Bangalore Traffic Police

Twitter: @bangalortraffic

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bangalore-Traffic-Police/147207215344994

Possibly the most interactive of the three Government agencies mentioned here. They tweet during peak hours about the roads to avoid due to traffic congestion, broken down buses, weather related reasons and also RT citizen reports. Their Facebook page allows users to lodge complaints, upload traffic violations and report unscientific and dangerous road conditions. They reply to your complaints with a copy of the letter sent to the appropriate officer for action and also provide you the name and number of the officer you may want to get in touch with. They are very smart in getting info of issues and violations that they are not able to monitor due to shortage of manpower or insufficient technology.

Success of these agencies will spur more Government agencies to interact with citizens to resolve complaints, solicit feedback to improve systems  and ultimately make citizens feel that they are contributing positively to the betterment of the society they live in.

Good luck and may your tribe increase.

A customer care solution that any small business can afford

Reblogged from Fascinating world of Customer Relationships:

So you think putting a customer service call center is going to set you back by a few crores?  Up until now, it used to. Not any more. Belladonna IT is now delivering affordable customer care solutions at affordable prices. What is more,

• Pay as you use subscription model
• Best of Breed CRM, Call Center and SMS Gateways
• No major capital investment…

Read more… 137 more words

Automating CRM tasks easily and painlessly

Some of the challenges during a CRM implementation include automation of some of the mundane tasks like:

1. Literature Fulfilment
2. SMS/E-mail alerts
3. Archival of e-mails
4. Sending out welcome packs, gift coupons and other marketing material.

This is true of most CRMs I have come across- Microsoft Dynamics, Sage CRM, Sage Saleslogix CRM and a couple of others.

I was very impressed with what Orbis Software’s TaskCentre solution could achieve so easily and at a very affordable price. We are very excited about TaskCentre based on some of the discussions and walk through’s we have done for our prospects.  Here is a link to their page on Business Process Management (BPM) Software for CRM Applications. You can  download some cool white papers as well.

The Nimble Way to grow your business.

http://bamsocial.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/nimble-social-crm

We are hiring

We have the following posts to be filled up immediately.

1. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect -1 Post

* 3-4 years techno functional implementation experience in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0/2011

* Programming knowledge of C#, .net

*Ability to scope a CRM project end to end

* Location: Bangalore

2. CRM Developer -2 posts

* 1-2 years of programming experience in C#, .net

* Knowledge of MS SQL 2005/2008

* javascript

*Location: Bangalore

Apply with your resume, expected CTC, notice period requirement to hr@belladonnait.com .

SBM helps Sage CRM interface with legacy systems

One of our largest clients, also market leader in its space called us the other day and told us a problem they wanted solved. Over time, the company has built or bought various applications spanning nearly a decade. Their field sales force uses Sage CRM, but in order to get information from these assorted applications, they were dependent on the old-fashioned e-mail transactions. As business needs grew, so did the data volumes, and with it data duplication.

The challenges before us included:

1. Some of the applications did not have a web service interface.
2. Some of the vendors who developed the applications were not in business anymore.
3. It took some convincing the IT development team that web services enabling all applications is the best way to go forward.
4. This had to be done in quick time and not seen as an EAI Project.

We approached Serena Software and they plunged into the problem along with our CRM implementation and development team. We were amazed at the speed and ease of use Serena Business Manager (SBM) could create the Proof of concept for us.  We were able to achieve the speed and completeness due to the following reasons.

1. Very user friendly interface.
2. Ability to create customer specific UI.
3. Drag and drop features, instead of writing code and linking up various web services.
4. Extensibility of the tool to cater to address the functional gaps, post integration.

Here is the snap shot of the solution.

SBM helps Sage CRM interface with legacy systems

 

(c) Belladonna Information Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore 2011.

Mobile Field Service

Ketharaman, an old friend and colleague, put up a microsite for our Mobile Field Service offering. Ketha is the founder and CEO of GTM360 , a fine initiative from one of the best marketing brains I have known in the IT industry. GTM360 addresses a crying need in the entrepreneurial space of the technology industry- how to take a new product to market (something VCs avoid, and I am yet to hear a convincing reason from them as to why they won’t fund a GTM initiative).

 

Belladonna IT’s mobile field service addresses the need to have affordable mobile solution for field service personnel across industries. Read more about it here.

http://www.gtm360.com/MICROSITE360/belladonnait/mfs/landing_page.html

Data Migration tips for CRM

The single biggest challenge for any CRM implementation, both for the customer and the implementer, is migrating data from XL sheets into CRM. The problem with XL sheets is that it can be filled in as the user likes. There are seldom any rules or pre-formatting done on XL sheets. Here are some examples of seemingly innocuous cell data that can be a challenge.

1. A name like Mr. John Smith actually goes into three different fields in any CRM – Salutation (Mr.), First Name (John) and Last Name (Smith).
2. An address such as 201, Meredian Towers, 328, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bangalore 560001, Karnataka, India needs to be broken up into Address 1 (201 Meredian Towers), Address 2 (328 Mahatma Gandhi Road), City (Bangalore), Postcode ( 560001), State (Karnataka) and Country (India).
3. The most complex of them will be multiple phone numbers in the same field. ‘Phone’ is a field type in CRM, and is normally restricted to 10 characters. XL will allow you to add multiple phone numbers separated by a comma or a ‘/’ but will get truncated on import. Same goes for multiple email ids.

Remember that you as a customer owns the data, not the implementer. It is in your interest to sanitize and make the best data available for import. There is no way to global search and find anomalies and auto-correct them. At best some CRM systems like Sage CRM will give you an error log. But the corrections have to be done manually.

Here are some tips to make clean data available for import.

1. Use a pre-built template for data migration. All CRMs will give you templates for various entities of a CRM- contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities, customer complains aka cases and others.
2. If you have data that you have cut and paste from the internet, such as URLs or mail ids, they leave a trace in the XL sheet which makes it impossible to convert into any other format such as csv or txt.  You are better off pasting the url/mail id into a notepad and then copying it into XL.
3. Have separate cells or columns for key fields like First name, Last name, City, Postcode, State, Email, Land Phone, Mobile Phone, website etc.
4. Do not add multiple people into a same cell (using Shift+Enter allows you a line feed within a cell in XL). This is a strict no no. Most applications when they sense a Shift+Enter in a cell, assumes that it is the end of the row and ignores the rest of the cells in the same row. Or worse, takes the next cell as the start of a new row.
5. The same logic holds good for phone numbers and email ids. Each row must contain only one data element.
6. Ensure the date format in your XL and CRM are the same. Though your XL will take the format from your control panel, CRMs need to be configured to adhere to a specific format.
7. Migrate data in a phased manner. Even if you have thousands of records, import data in an incremental fashion. Migrate a few batches of 10, verify and correct the CRM as well as the XL sheet. Up the batch size to 50, 100 and so on. I would not migrate a batch size of more than 1000 records even if there are 50,000 records to be migrated.
8. If you are migrating leads and opportunities, map the fields correctly for its contents. For eg, if the lead source in your XL has options like web/phone/e-mail/referred, the same four values must be present in CRM too. Same is the case with say a field like ‘Product Interested in’. Else the CRM will ignore unmatched records, or throw up an error. It is quite hard to predict what will the system do.

It requires immense patience and understanding of the data migration process into any application. It is not an exercise in replacing XL sheets with something more expensive and what may look like a painful substitute. But the organization needs a CRM to interact with its customers, potential buyers and in building ongoing relationships.