23 Nov Top 5 Business Risks Without CRM
When running a business, we often contemplate tons of questions in our head. One of them would be, “Do I really need a CRM?”. Frankly speaking, this kind of question is fair enough. We have been doing business just fine all this while, some might wonder, why put extra effort to implement yet another system? However, in the modern world of digitalization, not using CRM can actually put your business in jeopardy. As our businesses expand, the process of following up and keeping track of everything gets difficult as having one central place where all of the information lives is absolutely needed. In this blog, let’s take a look at some of the significant risks your business may suffer from not using CRM.
Top 5 Business Risks Without CRM
- Poor decisions due to poor insights
- Customer satisfaction becomes a long, winding road
- Lack of control and productivity
- Issue on transparency
- Bad Data
1. Poor decisions due to poor insights
Businesses can only be successful if they efficiently use data to make better decisions. The majority of successful firms place a high value on data management to ensure that data is current, precise, and, most importantly, usable. Moreover, data-driven metrics are the foundation of modern management, from staff hiring to customer happiness and retention.
When you run a business the old way, it’s difficult to get the information you need since data is dispersed all across the place. As a result, companies who do not employ CRM or other business solutions prefer to make decisions based solely on gut feelings rather than real-world performance indicators and projections supplied by this software. Relatively speaking, you won’t be able to view the “big picture” without custom CRM solutions since you won’t have the necessary data.
2. Customer satisfaction becomes a long, winding road
To obtain customer satisfaction, it requires that you keep track of all of your customers’ information and activities. It’s fairly simple to keep track of a tiny consumer base’s data where you need to ask yourself these questions:
- Did we have information on how the customer was obtained?
- Did they come to your site as a result of a successful campaign?
- Were they all referred by word of mouth?
- What are their choices?
With a modest customer database, traditional approaches work wonderfully. However, as your consumer base grows to hundreds of thousands, you’ll have a problem. CRMs are designed to assist you in keeping track of, understanding, and strengthening your business interactions with clients.
Your CRM solution will offer you all the critical information you need in a single click, regardless of how many customers you have. Features such as record linkage and comprehensive reporting assist you and the rest of the team in obtaining all important information on all of your customers right away. You’ll be completely reliant on spreadsheets and excel if you don’t have CRM, which will become less viable as your company grows.
3. Lack of control and productivity
Businesses that do not use CRM normally keep track of all customer, employee, and business data on a shared spreadsheet. Even though having something is better than none, spreadsheets contain a number of flaws that limit your data control. Even while you can safeguard certain tabs in a spreadsheet, you have less control over the tabs themselves. When you wish to protect sensitive data from certain users, this becomes an issue.
Another problem with spreadsheets is when a user deletes a row by accident and it goes undiscovered for a couple of days or weeks. No one will be able to tell what data was removed or what was omitted from the spreadsheet in this manner. Other than that, your staff can only be effective and competent if they know exactly what they’re intended to be doing and how to go about doing it.
Employees become confused and unable to focus when assignments are allocated and distributed across various mailbox, conversation threads, and team interaction platforms. Consolidating all data and processes into a CRM designed for project management reduces misunderstanding, resulting in increased performance and making team members motivated.
4. Issue on transparency
In the spirit of openness, do you know what your employees are working on each and every day? Are they concentrating their efforts on the issues that will have the biggest impact? It’s tough to say for certain without the proper technology in place.
Furthermore, you run the risk of overlooking potential problems if you do not have a good monitoring strategy in place. CRM delivers insights into your sales success through key performance measures and reports, allowing you to change your sales path and avoid any problems before they occur.
Connecting all of your project management data into a customer relationship management system gives much-needed clarity for your management team. Immediate visibility into who is getting the most work done can be gained through data-driven productivity reports. Each project’s life cycle is documented in detail through notes, tasks, and related emails. An intuitive and aesthetically striking framework for collecting ideas, ordering work, and attaining more goals, Kanban-style project boards are becoming increasingly popular.
5. Bad Data
The only thing that is worse than having no data is having bad data. Bad or poor data originates in a variety of shapes and sizes, as well as from a variety of sources. That’s why, albeit with a well-structured CRM, repairing and preventing inaccurate data is difficult. You don’t have a standard format for acquiring and managing data without a CRM, which makes your task even more complicated.
Let’s return to our spreadsheet scenario and think about your company’s method for documenting lost deals. When a contract falls through, salespeople simply type in a freeform account of what went wrong. Making sense of many paragraphs of disorganized text becomes unmanageable over the span of dozens or hundreds of negotiations. As a result, sales managers quit reading the summaries, and sales reps finally stop giving feedback.
When deals are designated as lost, a CRM, on the other hand, can be designed to provide an intuitive picklist. Sales reps simply choose the explanation with a click of the mouse and return to work. There will be no more lengthy paragraphs. There will be no more typos or omissions. Simply the facts. This method standardizes data entry, decreases the risk of inaccurate data, and improves your capacity to generate relevant reports and course-correct.
Ultimately, take the time to evaluate your company’s requirements, and then look for platforms that can easily be customized to meet your specific requirements and assist you in achieving your business objectives.