Consumers are the driving force of any business progress. All the improvements, innovations, tools, and services are aimed at enhancing the customers’ experience. What do you get from this?
Effective customer retention and leads attraction, growing sales, and other advantages successful companies can boast of. Bringing the CRM system into your company is one of the most effective methods to reach the goals you set for your business, especially in simplifying company-customer communication.
As practice shows, a quality CRM system can increase your sales rates by 87%. And the word “quality” is essential here. It’s not enough to introduce this system to your business, you should also ensure it works the way you expect it to. So here comes the understanding of the importance of CRM system design.
CRM System Design: Features to Implement
CRM stands for customer relationship management, so its main task is to make your interaction with customers more effective and productive. The two essential components of any CRM system are
- the dashboard user interface, which enables access to information about the client and analytical tools;
- software, which covers other components of CRM besides the dashboard.
The function of the CRM system is based on analyzing data about the customers and their online behavior so that you can target them with personalized offers and provide ultimate quality service. The features implemented into such systems comprise:
- The collection of data, including contact information, reaction to marketing efforts, and others.
- Data storage aims at keeping the client’s information conveniently; usually, cloud storage is used for this purpose.
- Access to the data is another feature a CRM system cannot exist without. It allows for quick access to all the information about the customer for analysis.
Design Requirements of a CRM System: The Role of Design
CRM design is the thing that predetermines the effectiveness of this tool. You’ll probably agree that having a bunch of features at their disposal won’t save the customers who don’t know how to use them. A human-oriented, intuitive interface is the only way to prevent this problem and ensure positive UX.
However, not only your customers will win from user-friendly CRM system design. Your company will enjoy even more benefits. Check them out!
- A higher return on investment. The simplicity of interaction with the digital platform allows users to learn how to deal with it really fast. Consequently, they will be eager to come back again and use your service more often.
- Enhancing customer retention. Being able to track every website visitor, it’ll be easier to keep in touch with the leads to convert them into customers.
- Easier communication. Once all the information about the client is concentrated in one place, it is much easier to communicate with them. Consistency and proper organization of the process make your interaction smooth and effective.
- Saving time. Your employees can get access to the information they need fast and easily, so they can provide quality service to the customers while spending less time and effort.
How to Design a CRM? Explaining Step-by-Step
How to design a CRM platform to make it a perfection? In fact, the process looks pretty straightforward at the first glance. But digging deeper, you understand that there are so many more things to do and take into account. We’ll start with some tips that might come in handy before you dive into the development process.
- Know your goals. Before working on CRM, you should define your goals and expectations. Not only this will help create the roadmap to follow, but it will also ensure the result is as you’ve envisioned it for yourself.
- Every user matters. Remember that CRM will be used by most of your company’s divisions. All these people need specific tools to operate effectively and provide ultimate customer service.
- Don’t be afraid of bringing innovations. Modern customers are much more demanding than they used to be only some years ago. They want convenience, they want good service, and they want innovation. Experiment. Stand out from your competitors with innovative solutions: integrate with social media, opt for cloud storage, or bring in mobile CRM. Still, you should be careful and don’t overdo it here.
- Simplicity is the key. Make your CRM design simple. Leave out all confusing and unneeded elements.
- Feedback matters. Real UX is nothing like your pre-release system testing. The customers’ feedback allows seeing your product flaws from another standpoint. This is priceless when it comes to improving your CRM design.
- Keep an eye on analytics. The way your customers interact with the CRM system can give you a better understanding of what should be added and what has been done perfectly well.
- Analyze the features and user behavior on the website/ in the app if you use ready-made CRM software. Those creating it from scratch should work out the algorithm of customers’ behavior by analyzing their potential activity on the platform.
- Analyze your competitors. Check their CRM systems for the most popular features to know whether you should include them in your product. Also, you may have ideas on how to improve them.
- Interview your users. The best way to know what features to include is to ask real customers what is relevant to them.
- Create information architecture. Once you know the functionality of your CRM, the design team can work on the development of information architecture to see how all the elements will join within one platform.
- Visualize your ideas. The work on wireframes and design prototypes is a huge step towards visualizing and testing your ideas in practice.
- Complete the process. If you are satisfied with the prototypes you’ve got, it’s time to make final decisions and complete the work on the design.
Bottom Line
CRM design development is much more complicated than it may seem at first. Still, by implementing clever solutions and giving enough time to the project, you’ll significantly boost your business effectiveness, which is the thing we want with the CRM system implementation.
