7 Important Functions You Must Have in a CRM System for Your Business

Implementing a CRM system at your company will allow you to increase its operation efficiency, improve decision-making speed, and automate routine processes. It is a crucial step to make. Therefore, if you have decided to develop a CRM system for your business, you have to clearly comprehend what functions it should include.

It is important to know both not to forget about important capabilities and not to waste time and money on unnecessary functions you most likely will not use. Those unclaimed functions will do nothing but delay the product release. A better approach is to add new features progressively as the need for them arises.

1. Planning and Task Management

With no common standardized CRM system, each employee will work the way they are used to. It is difficult to control people — some tasks are “lost” or not completed on time. Some managers may keep track of all tasks in Excel, some in Google Calendar, and some fail to do it at all, relying exclusively on their own memory.

When developing a CRM system, it is necessary to implement the possibility to plan tasks, set them, and work with them. Your employees should be allowed to create tasks for themselves and their colleagues, set reminders, etc. And the company head should have a possibility to control these processes.

Another convenient function is the possibility to set up an automatic task setting service. For instance, the task of processing quarterly reports will be created once a quarter, etc. Respectively, when the system receives the potential customer’s contact data, it will automatically create a task for a designated employee instructing them to call back on the specified phone number, for instance.

2. Repetitive Task Automation

Workflow automation is oftentimes among the most important functions for CRM systems. Think about the number of team members who will be freed from routine, recurring tasks within company workflows and assigned to reach more subtle objectives. This is exactly the advantage that will cover all development costs.

Automation minimizes the time spent on data updates. When one of the employees has added new data to the system, it becomes automatically available for the entire team.

Managers no longer have to constantly ask subordinates to report on the progress status. Process automation should necessarily be built into the system. If you are busy constantly updating your database, you will have no time or energy left for any team development effort.

3. Data Gathering and Analysis

Nowadays, it will not be enough just to automate your business, it is also important to get analytic data in various business areas to increase productivity, quality of service, and profit. If you implement this function in your CRM system, you will make the project more visible, allowing your company employees to make faster and better decisions.

When your system offers automated data collection and processing, you will get a more complete picture of your company’s work processes. For instance, you can assess each employee’s work productivity, prioritize a specific lead or customer, plan your work correctly, and optimize approaches to solving particular problems.

4. Data Import

You have to comprehend how the primary data will be entered into the system at the start and decide what possible format this or that kind of data will be entered in.

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It is crucial for the data to be imported fast, easily, and transparently, and allow important work information to be transferred automatically or semi-automatically. You can surely enter all the data manually, but this process is long and inconvenient, increasing the risk of data duplication.

Importing from Excel files is a universally applicable option. It is possible to transfer data to Excel tables from almost any system. Moreover, it is quite fast and convenient to enter data into the system in this format as well.

5. Sample Templates

When performing repetitive actions, templates allow employees to save their time, as well as money. Templates can be implemented to add projects or tasks, process calls, and attend to a wide variety of cases eventually arising in the process of communication with leads and customers.

This approach is especially useful and convenient for new employees in the company, as it allows them to get used to their new work faster. Moreover, it will speed up and optimize the experienced professionals’ workflow.

6. Integration with Other Services

Any business uses various services and turnkey solutions in the process of workflow management. Your CRM system should integrate with other tools used by your company in its operation: e-mail, IP-telephony, email distribution service, accounting, website, etc. The system should become the center of work processes — all tools work using it.

This approach saves a lot of time that employees spend collecting and adding data from different sources, as well as simplifies and optimizes work processes. It also simplifies data transfer and sharing within the company.

7. Report Generation

Using the report and analysis functions, a CRM user can generate reports based on various factors, draw a wide range of samples, and solve other similar problems.

For instance, you can get summary reports on the sales department indicators or employee productivity for a selected time period, work efficiency in a certain direction, the number of goods manufactured and shipped, etc.

To recap

All the functions listed above affect various company processes: communication among employees, work processes automation, interaction among departments, superintendence, etc. The CRM implementation objective is to mutually integrate these processes and become the core of the IT infrastructure for the company.

Many technologies can be used for CRM development, and one should make a responsible choice in this regard. Never try making everything perfect at once. Mind that the system will eventually change along with your business and you will have to gradually improve it to be in line with changing objectives and needs.

The Lvivity development team is ready to develop a custom CRM system for you, creating an individual solution that takes your business specifics into account.

Write to us, and let us discuss all possible issues!