CRM: Not Just for Sales Anymore

There was a time when CRM solutions were the exclusive domain of sales and (perhaps) marketing teams. A widespread belief that customer relationship data was not useful to other parts of the enterprise led to CRM silos–sometimes multiple CRM silos in the same company. At most, the customer data might be shared with the customer service team; more forward-thinking companies also shared it with their product support teams.

All of that is becoming a thing of the past. Companies that understand the value of their data are starting to make CRM data available enterprise-wide and using it in combination with other data sources to drive insights and make better decisions.

SoftServe is one of those companies. Despite its name, SoftServe does not deal in any way with semi-frozen dairy treats. Ukraine-based SoftServe is a global IT services company with over 9,000 employees across Europe and North America. When they migrated their on-premise CRM solution to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM in the cloud, they expanded the availability of CRM data to all departments within the company.

The benefits for SoftServe have been plentiful:

• All stakeholders in the company are now working from a single version of the truth with regard to customer relationship data.
• The integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator enhances the ability of the sales team to research potential customers and keep up with changes to existing customers.
• The cloud-based platform performs much better for the globally dispersed user community, resulting in a drastic reduction in help-desk tickets.

Moreover, the Dynamics 365 platform serves as a foundation for future expansion of the company’s digital capabilities. Among other items, SoftServe plans to add the Dynamics 365 Talent component for talent acquisition. Many other components are available to build a broad yet customizable ecosystem integrated across the enterprise.

Does your CRM system serve as the basis for sharing customer data across your organization, or is it still siloed? Are teams leveraging all of its capabilities, or is it seen as more of a hindrance than a helpful tool? By using the Empellor CRM “Self-Assessing Your CRM & Process Strategy Checklist,” you can ask the right questions to learn the truth about your CRM system’s place in your business application ecosystem. For example:

• Is your CRM driving your sales process and insight into the pipeline?
• Do users complain about the difficulty in generating or accessing CRM reports?
• Are all users, including key leaders, using CRM daily, or do different departments “do things their own way”?
• Is your CRM usage limited only to the sales team?

CRM can be so much more than a sales tool–as SoftServe learned, CRM data has benefits across the enterprise. To start moving your organization towards realizing those benefits, download the checklist today.