I was wondering which features are the most valued by crm users and by people interested in crm in general. So, I did a brief search as to what can I find in the internet. My findings were quite surprising.
For example, put the “top 10 crm features” phrase into Google. I would expect to get dozens of articles, one vying with another about what is more important or what is the killing feature for sales or marketing people they can die to have in their crm. And what is the search result? Surprisingly, the result is … one big fat zero. Really, you will find no such an article among top search results there. Hmm … right at that moment I got an idea for a topic of this blog post .
So, what are the top 10 crm features?
First, let’s lay some common ground what a “top 10 features” list shall be about. I propose that such a list should serve as a check list to somebody who does evaluate a crm for his needs. From that stand point we can derive this simple definition: top 10 crm features list shall be based on three criteria: first, a positive impact on crm user’s effectiveness and productivity. Second, the feature shall be a differentiator between various crm vendors. Third, the feature should be specific enough so that you can point finger at it. Ok, let’s come up with my list and take it as my contribution to a “top 10 crm features” parade.
- Outlook integration. Ok, there are some other office/workgroup email/time planning solutions, but Outlook rules. The point is that you would not really want to push your user to give up their best of breed email/time management tools. Instead, make sure your crm integrates with the tool and supports all the features that the users use for their email communication and time management.
- Excel integration. Same reasons as with Outlook. CRM reporting capability can be rich but free hand reporting, data migration etc. via spread sheets are essentially unbeatable, especially when it comes to specific one time shot situations.
- Life time contact records. It is all about contacts and communication with them. There is nothing more frustrating than loosing information when your contact changes his employer and you need to reflect this in a crm. Look for crm that keeps continuous thread of communication attached to a person even if the person changes employer or is employed in more companies etc.
- One record only rule. A crm shall never demand user to create more records for one real world object such as a contact, company, opportunity etc. Keeping more duplicate records is not a good idea and it leads to overhead, outdated information and lower effectiveness of users.
- Contact information. It is really annoying when you look at an opportunity and you do not have any information about the contact and the company attached to it. Make sure you have opportunity details with related contact and company overview displayed at one screen.
- Contacts merge. Despite all efforts, duplicate records of companies and contacts will appear. Make sure you have user friendly functionality for merging contact and company records including their relations to opportunities documents, communication etc.
- Custom fields. It is quite common that you can define custom field to your contacts or companies etc., but check whether you can choose such field as searchable and whether you will be able to use such custom field for searches.
- Contact Opt-in/out. It is quite handy when your sales people can easily (one-click check box) opt-in or opt out the contact from campaigns right from a contact page.
- Personalized emails. crm will give you the functionality to send blast emails, but check what personalization options are. Salutation is not enough, consider other dynamic fields like account manager name, signatures etc.
- Responsiveness. Last but not least, consider whether the crm application is responsive (fast) enough to avoid long term frustration of regular users.
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