Sales Force Marketing - Salesforce.com CRM:

Taking the Mystery Out of ROI in CRM Systems

 Most people working on CRM projects know the amount of money needed for the project but very few can actually justify the returns on it or the payback involved.

ROI Is Subjective
One of the first issues to contend with is that no two organizations will sell, market or provide customer service in the same manner. Given such a subjective scenario, how can companies begin to understand the real truth about ROI on customer relationship management systems? The first point of reference should be the calculation of the amount cost the organization when it does not have a CRM solution implemented.

Knowing Pain Areas
Since customer database software is essentially a tool to resolve problems within an organization, any company needs to pinpoint the exact pain areas within. Calculation of the payback or ROI will entail resolution of such pain areas by a CRM system implementation. It will serve to improve workflows and processes within the organization by means of workflow management software. Once you know the pain areas, you can compute the amount of dollars lost when you allow such problems to continue existing. This can include revenues lost when customers hang up at the first point of contact or when they prefer a competitive organization for products and services or when your organization buys more inventory than what it needs etc. It could also be revenues lost when you ramp up newer representations of customer management.

Technology Assistance
Once you have calculated the costs and the problems at hand, you need to assess how implementation of CRM database system can alleviate those issues or bring overall expenses down. As an example, an organization could gain B number of customers when they mitigate the call abandon ratio or will get C dollars in terms of savings when they manage inventory more effectively and save D dollars when they get skilled and experienced customer relationship representatives stay longer in their jobs.

Business Improvement
Ultimately, the objective of any CRM system is to save dollars and enhance business processes within an organization by means of better business automation. If it is difficult for an organization to pinpoint exactly the three areas where the organization can expect to see improvements, purchasing a CRM business system is a big mistake. This would be similar to buying a product without knowing what it is supposed to fix! Hence, you should always assess the problem at hand initially and then seek the appropriate customer CRM system useful to your purpose.

User Adoption
Even if you assess the issues and find out exactly how the customer management solution will resolve these pain points, the CRM system will fail to be useful unless everyone in the organization is open and enthusiastic about using the system. Often, teams need to be trained regarding usage of the customer relationship management system and this can eat into time spent on productive activities. By doing away with training and adopting a more DIY approach where users self learn, organizations cut down on slack time.

Source: Manny de Sousa link

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