Let's face a fact, the world of customer relationship management is no more just a traditional automatic Happy new year campaign email or a after service survey. Since the beginning of 2012 we have seen a revolution in CRM systems around the world. The focus today is not just about the customers but also on the ease of usability and features to the employees.
Phew ! Our systems are very friendly but wait ... did we hear "features" ? Yes features in terms of an applications is a collection of addons which makes the experience more interactive or fun to work with.
How great would it feel if my SAP CRM system plans my day automatically after reading my calendar, making a note of my important meetings, missed alerts, closing opportunities, creates a day-wise agenda and mails me the same every morning at 8 AM. Wooohoo !!! " My employees would love this and I can pay anything for such a great feature " , would be the words of a customer. Friends, there are many apps which are providing such features ! Traditional features are considered just a baseline these days.
The second thing which a lot of us ( CRM experts ) must have seen now a days are a set of silly kind of requirements ( sounds to us ) like I want to see a list of users in my organizational position who are using the CRM system or online ! ( Trust me, I had this encounter ). " Why do you need this feature ? you have office lync or GTalk for this feature " , were my words to him. "I need to know who I can transfer my service cases for the fastest response and if it's not possible in CRM please let us know as this is very important for us and Sales-force already has a plugin for this" , was his response.
Seems legit , isn't it ? Yes it is , at first it sounded useless but the explanation along with the comparison of another product was good enough for me to help him solve this.
Every time we tend to refuse for a requirement, just because we have no idea of how it can be done kills the trust ! Still there are situations which cant be implemented at all. One of my customers asked for providing him an auto-complete features in text boxes on CRM Web-UI, which simply was not possible due to the data throughput it will put on the system but we let him know about a work around which was accepted by him. Bottom line : "We just should not close an impossible requirement with a NO, provide an alternate solution". Trust me when you talk in business terms with the customer, the relation builds stronger and the trust grows.
