As your team grows and becomes more active, the necessity for tools to manage processes increases. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is one of these essential tools. In an age flooded with solutions and technologies, you might wonder: is a CRM system genuinely useful or just another trendy acronym? Let’s delve into this.
A CRM system helps centralize all information about your company—from customer data to office supply expenses—in one place. This centralization allows you to track customer and team needs, see who is handling which tasks, and monitor the stages of task completion. As a result, work processes and interactions can be organized more quickly and effectively. Let’s explore the benefits of using such platforms in more detail.
The primary and most apparent function of a CRM is centralized data storage. Unlike scattered records, spreadsheets, or files, a CRM system structures and simplifies data retrieval. It encompasses various types and formats of information, such as:
The information always remains accessible, even amid team changes, which is not only convenient but also efficient. Centralized storage and easy access allow for uninterrupted and delay-free work.
For example:
Real-time access to various team data allows you to monitor statuses, updates, and progress without needing to personally ask performers, thus avoiding distractions or added stress.
Imagine you have several open positions. While recruiters and HR managers review candidates, you can check in the CRM:
You can also monitor sales, logistics, production, and service provisioning. This requires setting up the system to match the specifics and needs of your work. The team can then update information to keep it current and accessible in real time.
Easy access to information when needed simplifies planning. For example, it’s much easier to organize team work properly when you understand the overall scope of tasks and individual workloads. In a CRM system, all this information is visible.
Transparent processes and planning bring clarity to both the team and clients. With current workload data available, you can:
These are just a few examples. Without a CRM system, you must gather information from various people, briefly pulling them from their tasks. This can delay task execution. Moreover, all data must be manually compiled—in tables, documents, notebooks, on flipcharts. While this is not always difficult, the more people and tasks involved, the more variables need to be considered, increasing the risk of missing something important.
Meanwhile, a CRM provides a ready solution or helps find one quickly. The information is already collected, and most likely, nothing needs clarification. Regarding free hours for meetings, less busy employees, and similar queries, the system generally allows everything to be visualized and filtered with a few clicks. Thus, the platform instantly "responds" to your questions.
Transparent processes and real-time information access allow effective analysis of both team and individual performance. It’s essential to evenly distribute tasks among individuals and different stages, ensuring no one suddenly finds themselves without work or, conversely, overloaded.
This can include monitoring how much time each task takes for each executor, how long it takes to sign an agreement, how many employees are in their probation period and with what results, etc.
It’s also useful to compare how different managers and teams cope. It wouldn’t hurt to track correlations between seasonality, the number of stages, the experience of executors, the complexity of tasks, and the time required to complete them. Such analysis helps optimize work, as it highlights problems or bottlenecks. Knowing what exactly causes difficulties and takes up the most time, you can start looking for solutions to fix these issues.
Another advantage of using a CRM system is the ability to better organize standard processes. If you set up an action algorithm for repeat tasks, task execution takes minimal time and effort. Work proceeds according to a clear, predefined scenario anchored in the CRM.
One example of such processes, familiar to any company, is the onboarding of new team members. If this isn’t standardized, you could lose an entire workday just not having prepared a laptop for an employee in time. Similarly, you can save time on training new people by simply defining a clear sequence of actions and recording them in the system.
Organizing repeat processes significantly minimizes the human factor. Whether it’s about client signatures on work acceptance, “before” and “after” photos, cargo snapshots before dispatch, or something else, when everything is defined and anchored in the corporate CRM, the chances of forgetting or missing something are practically reduced to zero. After all, the algorithm doesn’t need to be kept in mind or even practiced to automatism. It’s always just a few clicks away.
Automation has a special place. It works best for tasks in marketing, sales, and support. A significant portion of the “boring” work can be entrusted to the CRM system.
For example, you can automate marketing campaigns for specific user bases. The same goes for follow-up messages, forms for evaluating the work of the support team, proposals to leave a review about a product or service, etc.
This way, you speed up the execution of routine tasks and relieve the team. Specialists can spend this time on more creative tasks where the system cannot cope, or on setting up other automated processes.
Moreover, automation also helps avoid minor errors caused by the human factor. For instance, you need to check a message template or form only once, not before sending it to each client.
Therefore, a CRM system contains a vast amount of information about your clients and work. Just leaving it here for storage would be irrational (although even such a minimum plan adds convenience to daily work). Hence, it’s worth thinking about what all these data tell us.
Typically, a CRM contains built-in tools for analysis and analytics. Others allow exporting data to .xlsx or .csv for further independent analysis. Often among the functions are various representations of current filtered data. You can view orders as a list, calendar, Kanban board, etc.
All this adds context and allows a better understanding of the team’s capabilities. You can break down a huge amount of information into smaller, more structured pieces to track your productivity and plan development in the short and long term. At the very least, it becomes easier to address issues and determine adequate key performance indicators (KPIs).
The benefits of a CRM system are not limited to a specific industry or line of work. Such a platform is effective for IT teams and community organizations, as well as construction firms, beauty salons, and private schools. Here are a few examples:
Any company can maintain a database of candidates and the history of interviews, set up the onboarding process, requests for vacations and sick leaves, conduct inventory, optimize the work of the office manager, and much more.
Probably the most common myths about CRM systems are their complexity and cost. In reality, a CRM does not require substantial investments for setup and maintenance. Nor is the system necessarily complex to use.
There are numerous platforms for companies and teams with very different needs and budgets, varying in functionality and rates. For example, Tracy—an app builder for managing work processes—allows you to easily set up the platform for your processes and add the necessary integrations.
In particular, you get a personal app for each team member—without programmers or significant expenses. Here you can organize a shared workspace for your projects, tasks, applications, etc. You can set up a step-by-step process algorithm, view it in different visualizations (Kanban board, Gantt chart, calendar, etc.), and allow access to different stages only to selected participants.
Rates vary only in resource volume and start with a free option. To start using the builder, just select an initial template and set up additional blocks. If needed, you can independently change fields and ways of interacting with data and manage access.