Intelligent Thinking: Smarter Deployment for Better CRM Integration

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...or build stage, when it is discovered that the dependencies and required hardware have not been factored in.

Business first
While most organisations inevitably want to go-live as soon as possible in order to begin realising the associated benefits of CRM, this approach can lead to unintended consequences. Good planning will help avoid these pitfalls by highlighting the impact of the approach.

A well-planned project considers all aspects of the project — not just those related to the technology. For example, a project team that is solely focused on realising the technical solution as quickly as possible may be unable...

...to effectively support the key business users. The unintended consequence of this can quickly become poor acceptance of the solution within the business because the core users have not been supported in adjusting to the new system.

Make it personal
CRM is used in different ways by different users. To optimise user performance, the user interfaces should be configured to support and enforce business process by considering the tasks that are required to perform a particular job function. Determining the optimal number of configurations is a key task that should be performed by a specialist who understands how to maximise user adoption while minimising the effort to build and maintain the different configurations.

The broad range of business processes supported by a modern CRM system require a significant amount of information to ensure they are integrated across the enterprise and the necessary business intelligence can be gleaned from the subsequent reporting. Burdening end users with the task of providing this information does not make for an efficient process.

Fortunately, a lot of information can be automatically derived using predefined business rules and contextual information about the task being performed and the person performing it. Significantly, determining the information required to function has the benefit of freeing-up... continued on page four >

 

 

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