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Research from AMR and others indicate that as many as one out of three CRM implementations fail. The reason might surprise you because it isn’t technical. The research suggests that CRM initiatives often fail due to insufficient end-user involvement and buy-in. Yep. It’s that simple. Even if you’ve purchased Salesforce, the world’s most popular CRM, it just doesn’t matter if people won’t use it, especially sales people.
The value proposition of a CRM like Salesforce is pretty straight forward, but there’s a catch. The system is only useful to the extent that it contains detailed information about every interaction with a client or prospect. You can run reports all day, but if the information isn’t there, you can’t get helpful guidance on improving your business.
So, why is user adoption such a challenge? Let’s look at one type of interaction as an example. It is likely that the most common way your sales people and customer service agents interact with prospects and customers is the telephone. You’ve probably instructed them to log every call into salesforce.com, but if they are like many, the only calls that they view as “significant” are logged. This makes it very difficult to determine important metrics such as how many calls it takes to get a prospect on the phone, or how often your least profitable customers call support. The reason all calls aren’t logged is simple. It isn’t natural or compulsory. In fact, it can take longer to log the call than to make the call. Productivity and good analytics become at odds.
Fortunately, telephone technology has caught up with cloud based CRM solutions and there is now an elegant solution to this problem. Salesforce can be configured to control phones featuring CTI (Computer Telephony Integration). This means that instead of dialing a phone and logging the call into Salesforce as two separate tasks, users simply click on a phone number inside of Salesforce and the phone is dialed. What’s more, the call is automatically logged into the contact record and the user is prompted to make notes. The process is seamless and the friction between productivity and analytics is removed.
Of course, this is just one aspect of user adoption, but it’s a big one. Integrating the telephone with Salesforce helps answer the “what’s in it for me” question that users ask even if they don’t do it out loud. The idea of never dialing a phone or manually entering a call is appealing even to the most resistant users and will help you avoid joining the long list of companies who could just never make CRM for them.
M5 has been perfecting our CTI integration with Salesforce for years. Recently, we’ve teamed up with Bluewolf to help our customers catch even more of those oh-so-important interactions. Come see us at Dreamforce in Bluewolf’s booth 701 as we introduce our contribution to The Social Enterprise.
M5 Networks is the market leader in business phone systems. M5’s’ client-focused, cloud-based solutions allow businesses to work the way they want to while connecting them to their customers and integrating their business-critical applications. Industry-award winning M5 Networks pioneered hosted VoIP and today provides more than 1,800 companies with enterprise-class phone systems.
