Keeping it Simple.
By Mike Richardson.
Over the years here at Maximizer we have seen a gradual increase in the complexity of solutions with clients or prospects who are seeking to find that elusive competitive edge. However, I’ve personally always believed in keeping things simple because often ideas and their full implications haven’t been fully worked through. The more complex a solution, the more difficult it gets to see which aspects really make a difference in real orders, revenues, profits and personal productivity.
The overall aim of an effective CRM solution should be to give all your staff the tools and data they need to do their job, to do it well and to provide you, as a manager, a 360° view of the business, whilst not clearing out your bank account.
So here is the fundamental question… Do you need to add more complexity to your CRM solution? Is customisation really required and will integration improve your work processes and business performance?
As a company either looking to implement a new CRM solution or developing an existing system, I would recommend keeping things simple: take time to consider how your organisation will use the additional functionality you plan to pay for, ensure you are fully aware of the standard features and numerous ways available of achieving requirements. If you need to go the development route, phase any new functionality deployment, so that you can check its effectiveness at each stage. Ensure your CRM provider can show you similar work they have completed in the past, make sure any development work is flexible enough to cope with future changes in the way you work, so you don’t have to go through the whole process again. In summary, I am suggesting you follow the same approach as the guys at Pirelli telling the F1 teams… sorry, the tyres we will produce from now on will be a little steadier, but they won’t blow halfway through the race and need replacing every twenty laps.
The beauty of Maximizer CRM is in the rich feature set, as well as in the simplicity of its user interface & how this can be customised to fit into your business, with an interface design that flows across all the modules, improving your user experience.
Maximizer as standard has some inbuilt functionality that could be used to improve the way the solution fits into your business: we now have ‘key field lists’, which can be customised to display only the specific data you wish to see; menus & buttons can be renamed to mirror the terminology used in your organisation; the organisations process flow could also be incorporated into the application, using the inbuilt mandatory fields & the rule based field type. And finally, dashboards can be fully customisable by the users and in most cases reduce the need for specific reports.
However, there are some complex scenarios where the Maximizer feature set might not fit your requirements and in such cases, our business partners can provide you with a custom solution. Using the available toolkit, forms based input screens can be created to tailor the Maximizer interface to your specific requirements and/or processes. Integration with other systems is also possible in the form of additional tabs in Maximizer, which can be used to display data from other systems in your business.
If you want to gain a competitive advantage for your business, within sporting rules and without the budget of an F1 team, take a look at how Maximizer CRM can help.
We often find when first engaging with a customer on their CRM needs that they have an extensive list of what they want in their CRM solution. Fortunately Maximizer CRM tends to tick all the required boxes but experience gained with working with customers using CRM over the last decade and a half confirms the old 80/20 rule of thumb: 80% of customers are using 20% of the features and 20% are using 80%. The fact that their CRM solution offers them at least another 20% of features that will unlikely ever be used is no doubt reassuring but it does point to one thing: folk like to keep things simple, as you say, and it is a strength of Maximizer CRM that its ease-of-use user experience isn’t compromised by its powerful powerplant under the hood.