How to establish the CRM Success Measures of a new CRM system

Are you struggling to identify how you can measure your CRM’s success and return on investment?

As with any project, everyone must know what success looks like, especially when working with a third-party. Your CRM Success Measures are what will guide them on where to focus their efforts.

There’s good news: developing your CRM success measures doesn’t have to be daunting. With the right guidance and tools at your disposal, you can easily identify them.

 

In this article, we’ll walk through how to establish what you should be measuring. Once done, you’ll know exactly how to define a key element of your CRM Strategy. Ready? Let’s dive in.

 

The 3 Categories of CRM Success Measures 

For those familiar with QGate, you will know that we like simple steps and categories. There are 3 key areas to consider when measuring the success of your CRM project; Business Metrics, Customer Perception Metrics, and User Adoption Metrics.

 

Business Metrics

Business metrics are quantifiable measures used to track the progress of a business process. The metrics you identify will be dependent on what business process you are using CRM for and must align with your organisation’s overall business metrics.

 

Start by looking at your organisational business metrics that are used to track how well your company is performing. Identify the ones that are likely to be improved by a new CRM and the process you are systemising within. The most obvious ones are:

  • Revenue
  • Cost
  • Profit 
  • Gross Margin %
  • Orders
  • Average Order Value
  • Average Order Quantity

 

Customer Perception Metrics

CRM is put in place to better serve customers in some way. It is important to assess how process changes impact your customers, and this is where customer perception metrics come in.

 

You may measure customer perception already. If you don’t, it’s useful to get this in place before your CRM goes live so that you can compare this before and after your deployment.

 

The most common way to measure customer perception is through a feedback mechanism. Benchmarking this before CRM allows you to see how successful it’s been in benefiting your customers.

 

User Adoption Metrics

One of the biggest reasons for the failure of a CRM delivering expected value is lack of user adoption. It is essential to put some quantifiable measures in place to help understand how your employees and teams use the system.

 

Some typical ways to measure user adoption are:

  • Number of Logins
  • New Record creation
  • Record update frequency
  • Data Quality 
  • Completeness of Records
  • Time in System

 

One advisory here: you do not want to be seen spying on users ‘Big Brother’ style. Don’t just challenge individuals – if users are not engaging, they are not seeing the value. If they are not seeing the value, then your customers are not either. 

 

The Key Takeaways

In most cases, all the metrics you need to establish and measure are already being used in your business. You can gather them by talking to the right people in the right teams. 

 

Develop your CRM Success Measures as part of your overall CRM Strategy within the guidelines of SMART objectives.

 

Clarify which CRM Success Measures your business is looking to focus on and drive with CRM. 

 

Keep the number of measures to a reasonable level so that results do not get diluted. 

 

Focus on becoming a master at one or two things first then develop other areas on a strong foundation of success.

 

Prioritise your Measures and communicate them well.

 

Try our CRM Readiness Assessment and receive a report with more guidance around setting up your CRM goals and CRM success measures.

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