What Is Your CRM Doing for Your Team Members?
What is your CRM doing for your team members? It's a simple question, but one that doesn't get asked often enough.
Most companies measure their CRM by looking at sales, revenue, pipeline, customer retention, data quality, or reporting. Those measurements are important, but they only tell part of the story.
CRM also has the potential to fundamentally change the team member experience. When it's designed well, CRM can give team members the information, tools, visibility, and confidence they need to do their jobs better. It can remove frustration, encourage autonomy, and help people feel more successful in their day-to-day work. In other words, CRM can be an empowerment tool for your team.
Give Team Members the Information They Need
Few things are more frustrating for team members than being expected to solve problems without access to the information needed to solve it. A customer calls with a question. A team member knows someone in the company has the answer but doesn't know who. He searches through emails, checks spreadsheets, sends a Teams or Slack message, and waits. Meanwhile, the customer is waiting too.
A well-designed CRM can eliminate much of that frustration. Customer history, previous conversations, open opportunities, service issues, contacts, activities, and other relevant information can be available in one place. Instead of hunting for information, team members can find it when they need it. That does more than save time. It gives team members confidence.
When people have the information they need, they are better prepared to make decisions, answer questions, and take ownership of customer relationships. That's empowering.
Give People More Control Over Their Work
Team members generally want to feel that they have some control over how they do their jobs. CRM can help provide that control. Rather than depending on a manager or another department to tell them what needs attention, team members can see their priorities, activities, opportunities, and customer interactions for themselves. They can determine what needs to happen next. They can identify potential problems. They can manage their workloads. They can take action without constantly waiting for someone else.
That shift—from dependency to autonomy—can make a significant difference in the team member experience. People tend to feel more engaged when they're trusted to manage their responsibilities rather than simply being told what to do.
Make the Job Easier
Let's face it: nobody gets excited about administrative work. Team members don't wake up thinking, "I can't wait to enter that same customer information into three different systems today." Yet that's exactly what happens in organizations where systems and processes haven't kept up with the way people complete their work or the information they need to do so effectively.
A good CRM should eliminate unnecessary work, not create more of it.
Automation can handle repetitive tasks. Workflows can move information where it needs to go. Templates can reduce manual entry. Dashboards can make important information easier to find.
Every unnecessary step that is removed gives team members a little more time to focus on engaging with clients and prospects or other team members. And those little improvements add up.
Team members who spend less time fighting the system have more time to talk to customers, solve problems, build relationships, sell, collaborate, and accomplish the things they were hired to do. That's good for productivity. It's also good for morale.
Turn Managers into Coaches
CRM can also improve the team member experience by changing the relationship between managers and their teams. Without good visibility, managers often must ask team members for constant updates. "What's happening with this customer?" "Did you follow up?" "What's the status of that opportunity?" "Can you send me a report?"
None of these questions are unreasonable. But when team members have to answer them repeatedly, it can create the feeling that they're being monitored rather than supported.
A CRM can provide managers with visibility without requiring team members to continually explain what they're doing. That creates an opportunity for managers to spend less time gathering information and more time coaching their teams. Instead of asking, "What's the status?", the conversation can become, "I see you're running into an issue here. How can I help?" That's a very different team member experience.
Help Team Members See Their Own Success
Another overlooked benefit of CRM is visibility into performance. Team members don't always see the bigger picture of the work they're doing. A CRM can help change that.
When team members can see their completed activities, customer interactions, opportunities, progress toward goals, and other accomplishments, their work becomes more tangible. They can see that they're making progress. Managers can see it too, and that creates more opportunities for recognition.
Recognition matters. People want to know that their work is noticed and that what they do contributes to something bigger than simply completing another task. CRM can provide the data that makes those contributions visible.
Don't Turn Empowerment into Micromanagement
There is an important distinction, however. The same CRM that empowers team members can also make them feel micromanaged if it's used incorrectly. More data doesn't automatically mean better management. If every CRM activity becomes a measurement of whether someone is working hard enough, the system can quickly become a source of anxiety rather than empowerment.
The purpose of CRM visibility should be to help team members and managers make better decisions, not to create a digital stopwatch. Team members should understand why information is being captured and how that information benefits them, their customers, and the organization. When people understand the why, they’re much more likely to see CRM as a tool rather than another layer of corporate oversight.
Build the CRM Around the Team
Perhaps the most important consideration is how the CRM is designed. Too many CRM projects begin with a list of things management wants to track: Which fields do we need? Which reports do we want? Which information should the team enter? What should appear on the dashboard?
Those are legitimate questions, but there's another set of questions that should come first: What makes our team's jobs harder than they need to be? Which information would make them more effective? Which processes could we simplify? Which tasks could we automate? What would allow them to make decisions without constantly asking for help?
Those questions lead to a very different CRM. Instead of building a system team members are simply required to use, you're building a system designed to help them succeed. And people can tell the difference.
CRM Should Work for the Team
The ultimate measure of CRM shouldn't be whether team members can successfully enter data into it. It should be whether the CRM helps them do their jobs better. Does it give them confidence? Does it give them autonomy? Does it eliminate unnecessary work? Does it help them make better decisions? Does it make their accomplishments more visible? Does it allow managers to coach rather than constantly monitor?
If it does those things, CRM becomes much more than a customer database. It becomes part of the team experience. And that might be one of the most overlooked opportunities in CRM today.
Companies spend enormous amounts of time thinking about how CRM can improve the customer experience. They should. But the customer experience is ultimately delivered by people.
Give your team members the information, tools, and freedom to succeed, and you're not just improving your CRM. You're creating a better place to work.
Danny Estrada is founder of E Squared, a management consulting firm. Throughout his career he has been a CRM evangelist and expert at leveraging technology platforms to create business value. He has been a senior director at KPMG and a thought leader for Salesforce and Microsoft, and he was published in an industry whitepaper by the Harvard Business Review. He also holds an executive MBA from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.