With the daily advances in digitalization of the whole customer journey, it is crucial to find the right information at the right time. But it is not enough, the ability to make the conclusions out of the available data in order to fulfill the customer needs and expectations can and will play a crucial role in positioning your company in the market.

More than ever, the customers are getting used to providing more and more information about themselves, but only if they feel secure and are expecting benefits for this information. What are the unique selling points you can provide in return for this information? How can you setup your IT to provide these benefits out of the box and is the solution flexible enough to be adjusted tomorrow if the market changes?

Customer Relationship Management Tools (short CRM) have been existing in the market for a long time. In their beginning they started evolving from a basic customer information database, focusing primarily on the needs of a sales team in a company.

But in the recent years, the “simple” collection of customer related data has become ineffective because of the shear amount of information – the companies are becoming overloaded in the data volume and it is humanly not possible to process the amount of information in an acceptable time. Because information is always needed at the specific moment, not tomorrow or in a week. Due to these raising expectations, the tools have developed into central orchestrators within a company depending on a tight integration of other company or even external applications. This was the birth of XRM – Cross-Relationship-Management.

The challenges of these days

Even-though collecting the basic data about your customers might seem to be sufficient and for sure it is a basic functionality of any modern XRM system, the question is, if this is sufficient. If all your competitors would be stuck at this technological level, the answer might be “Yes”. But in reality, the most successful companies are already utilizing the benefits of an advanced XRM tool. So even for small companies, it is becoming inevitable to start exploring this area for themselves.

But especially for a small company, this task can turn into a night mare. The selection process of the right tool can consume many man-weeks of your internal time, since the market coverage offers endless possibilities starting from open-source solutions (which might still surprise you with unexpected costs at a later stage) up to high-end solutions for multinational corporations. Many of the tools are already specialized in covering a specific industry and support the processes out of the box.

For sure, if you can spare one of your good employees for a period of several weeks, he or she can prepare an analysis of your internal needs, can scout the market for possible solutions, talk to the different vendors, calculate the costs of implementation and operating of the solution. Additionally, the colleague might also consider what you will need after the introduction of the tool, will define the proper skill matrix for the people who will have to work with the tool in the future and will be able to redesign the existing processes to fit into the digital world.

Most likely, if the topic is new, you will be reinventing a wheel and investing your time and money not efficiently.