In today’s interview with Julija Varneckienė – Operations Coordinator at Ferratum Group we will be mainly talking about the importance CRM, its customer experience and successfully applying it within your business.

After perusing a master degree in e-commerce, she has been working with CRM for about 10 years, mainly in insurance sector. When she started she didn’t know much about CRM but was gaining experience year after year with collecting vast experience in researches and analysis, business processes and requirements, customer experience, CRM and related software maintenance and customizations, processes’ quality assurance and optimization.

1. Can in your opinion CRM Process Flow replace traditional CRM training?

CRM Process Flow has a huge impact on CRM development and process understanding (by the end user). It helps company to find the “pain points” in their processes. Process Flow enables you to see the “big picture” of your CRM. Nevertheless, it couldn’t replace CRM training. It is essential to talk to people, to communicate and to clarify the key parts of your processes.  

2. How do you improve CRM use compliance with your sales team?

By watching and listening the very sales, sometimes helping them live as the problem occurs. I prefer listening to what sales team says, against making them follow a rude tool at a cost of efficiency. I tend to imagine myself watching the user filling in the data to the CRM and then bugs starting popin’ in or some buttons refusing to do their work. It’s not the very tool that makes sales team be disappointed, but lack of possibility to feedback, to change things. Listen to your team, react on problem (even if it seems unimportant), solve it, communicate, PR your team’s success stories, engage them. 

3. What makes CRM program a good one?

I worked with 3 CRM systems over my career. The good one is one that covers your needs most, works stable and can be customized fast in the way you need, without necessity for a large budget. CRM should be as flexible as your business is, meeting all the changes your business face.

4. How much time should a company invest in CRM training of their employees?

It depends on how many processes you have in your CRM and how much knowledge your employees have. I usually do at least 4 hours training for new employees and hold open line for the questions during few months. Each month I run “open” sessions for employees that have questions, or want to go deeper. Usually it is average from 4 to 8 hours per employee or team training. If there’s a new process, I run a 30-minute session to improve users experience.

5. How can CRM help to improve the overall experience of a customer?

CRM is like your favourite small shop in a hometown, where salesman knows about your family, he knows that Mrs Jones is on vacation and there is no need to send her birthday flowers as she is only back a week later. He also knows Mr Black has his lunch at 11 a.m., he is vegan and never buys eggs; Mrs Monika’s eldest sun just went to the university so she buys more chocolate to control her stress. Salesman knows details, because they are essential for better communication with his customers, because of this knowledge everyone is treated as unique customer.

CRM also helps to treat each customer differently. With CRM there is no need to investigate the needs every time customer is calling, you can already predict what he is about to ask for.

CRM helps employees remember every customer’s case, like if you promised to call in 2 weeks – be sure that CRM would remind of it as well as give you couple of useful hints for the call. And even when your sales person left the company your new employee will start the call from very same point previous salesman has stopped at. It is a lasting process of keeping all the necessary information together, in one system and clear. Collect, store, analyse and work with data and processes.

P.S. You wouldn’t have it immediately after you bought the fancy software, but only gain it being consistent year after year. You will be getting better at understanding customer behaviour and that in turn will increase your efficiency and productivity, both with customer experience and loyalty.

6. Is in your opinion the CRM market space overcrowded at the moment?

There are lots of vendors in CRM market – free, expensive, simple, Cloud, integrated and etc. I believe every system can find its customer.

7. What are some of the common CRM mistakes?

• Lack of communication between managers and employees and lack of support from a TOP management.
• Lack of resources focused on CRM development.
• CRM as “stand-alone” system without any integrations, that usually makes employees spending more time on entering information in several systems. CRM has to decrease the effort, not complicate things even more.