Evaluating CRM effectiveness
Realizing the investment towards any CRM initiative, it is crucial to all businesses to have a CRM evaluation method or CRM metrics in place. The prime concern of a CRM system is to improve relationship with customers and generate higher revenue. Therefore, it is necessary to identify if your CRM is to track the efficiency of sales and marketing team or is it to build a strong relationship with your customers? This would help determine the focus of CRM performance. Once the objective of CRM implementation is clearly defined, you can go ahead evaluating the best CRM for your business. This would help to judge how good or bad your CRM initiative has been?
Here are a few major points that can guide you in evaluating a CRM system at its face.
CRM ROI
Depending on the type of implementation and the strength of organization, CRM initiative can be a complex and costly venture. Thus your selected CRM should:
•    Provide tangible and measurable ROI
•    Help calculate the real business benefits
•    Enable accurate budgeting and reduced resources
Ease of Use
Implementing a CRM system should:
•    Simplify customer relationship and business process
•    Provide a user-friendly interface
•    Allow ease of CRM navigation
Simplified Workflow
A CRM system in place, should help:
•    Perform the various tasks easily
•    Present simplified workflow logics
•    Encourage easy adoption by users
Customization
The real efficiency of any CRM implementation lies in:
•    Flexibility to change the default CRM setup
•    Provision to mould the CRM to your business process
•    Provision to rollback to the default CRM setup
Integration
The drive to maximize the value of your customer relationship necessarily demands the CRM system to:
•    Provide well-defined integration architecture
•    Enable cross-application business process
•    Reduce implementation time for custom integration
Post-Sales Support
No CRM system is complete without the end user help files. Besides the tips and tricks to efficient performance, your CRM implementation should have:
•    Reference documentation for users
•    Ready on-line support
•    Notes and tutorials to complement documentation