Businesses see the light of the day as well as twilight within CRM systems all over the world. Whether the focus is on current customers or future prospects, accurate contact information helps in driving marketing and sales initiatives for a business. Achieving high level of data quality and maintenance is necessary for every CRM system. Yes, optimizing CRM software for improved productivity should be a top priority. Below are few CRM maintenance basics, one should follow to get the most out of the system:
- Clean Data Regularly
CRM’s data is the most essential characteristic with regard to all the aspects of a business where the CRM utilization and productivity comes into picture. Access to quality data at the right time will help you engage with your customers in a more personalized and effective manner. Most importantly, it would prevent you from wasting time and resources on those prospects that are least likely to qualify.
You can declutter your CRM system in various ways. De-duplication is one of the default features of Sage CRM, which helps in identifying duplicate records and entries at the initial stage of data entry thus, helping you rectify the same immediately. Avoiding duplicates not only helps in saving the user’s or rep’s time, but also helps in maintaining accuracy within the sales metrics thus, helping you drive conversion rates.
Record completeness is another measure, which not only helps in data cleaning, but also helps keep the data up-to-date. Covering up missing or incomplete data increases data dependency whilst improving data search facility.
- Review Customizations
Over time, a CRM system expands not only in terms of data, but also in terms of customizations. It is necessary to review the amount of customizations in CRM, which includes the number of custom fields added, worthless links or inefficient or unmanaged workflows.
Removing unwanted elements and simplifying your CRM system is a small maintenance task and when handled on a regular basis, it would help keep the system efficient whilst driving user experience.
- Backup Your Data
CRM houses confidential and crucial information about your contacts, leads, opportunities, prospects, vendors, etc. Thus, automating backups that will store a copy of CRM data at multiple locations will help in case of technical breakdown or emergency. Most of the cloud CRM software vendors help with backing up the system’s data automatically. However, it is recommendable to ensure timely CRM backups.
- Fine-tune Your CRM
Though technical aspects of implementing a CRM is finalized by implementation experts, it is advisable to fine-tune the system on a periodic basis. Your CRM may be connected/integrated with various other enterprise tools, so it is necessary to review these integrations in order to make sure that all the aspects function at their optimum best. Any obsolete system if integrated with your CRM system may slowdown the system. Thus, reviewing system performance will help overcome such glitches.
A CRM system ought to be user-friendly and conducting periodic and timely maintenance would greatly help in making the users fall in love with the system.
Get more customers to your business and retain the ones you already have with Sage CRM. You can request a demo at sales@sagesoftware.co.in.
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