Author: Nikolay Bulava, CEO
It took only two months for COVID-19 to change the world. The introduction of quarantine has changed the way of running the business and negatively impacted the economy. Companies are forced to adjust their processes and systems to new conditions of the remote work. CRM is no exception.
When self-isolating, we cannot receive important CRM information from our colleagues over a cup of coffee or lunch, by bumping into them in the corridor or elevator and overhearing some talks in the open space. We need to have some means to get aware of important events through the CRM-system.
The case is not only about events that are directly reflected in CRM data like a phone number was changed, or a case was closed, but also about events that happen in other information systems and are related to customer/contact/order/request/invoice/product/….
- Payments and delays in payment
- Changes in customer rating
- Changes in service settings which the customer does independently through the self-service portal
- Usage of the application or service by the customer
- Data on changes in delivery time
Since it’s a huge information flow, it means that CRM system’ users inevitably face the following challenges:
- How to be aware of all essential things at the right time without talking to the colleagues and, at the same time, not to snow under the flow of one-time notifications. E-mail or other types of notifications are useful if we need to respond immediately, after a while, we may just forget about them.
- How to be able to discuss the occurred events remotely and asynchronously, and save the discussion history in the CRM system for those who are out of the picture, and who may need it in the future. Slack or other similar collaboration tools store a history of collaboration separately from CRM data. When we face information in the CRM system, we may just not be aware of the discussion’s history outside of it.
An IT-team faces its own challenges to provide the necessary support of business because each company has plenty of such events, and they are different in both the structure and content. It means that IT-teams have to have a tool to do the following:
- to collect data different in content and structure from any digital channel
- to automate reaction to the event taking into account its content
However, in this case, the biggest challenge of the IT-team will be the necessity to keep up with the speed of changes in business requirements regarding events and automated responses.
The evolution proved to us many times that it’s not the strongest of the species survives, but the one most adaptable to change. This rule is valid in the natural world and the business world as well. However, in the business world, we have to follow one more rule to survive – to do it effectively in terms of costs.
How to adapt your Sugar CRM to collect various business events quickly and effectively?
