Businesses are unable to realize what they are missing out on.
It's what it is to have a blind spot. The sales team believes they know what is happening in the pipeline. Support staff believe they know all about the customer. Finance believes that the numbers on which he is looking are up-to-date.
But in the midst of all those teams, real business issues are simmering away, deals that are falling through without resolution, customers that are churning due to unanswered tickets, revenue expectations being based on data that no longer reflects reality because it's been weeks since the end of last year.
There is no lack of effort, that's not what causes operational blind spots. They are due to architecture. Without integration, there are invisible gaps between the systems that various teams operate. Bad decisions are made at invisible gaps.
What operational blind spots actually look like
First, let's discuss the experience of being blind in a real business before architecture.
A sales person finishes a deal and passes it on to the operations team. The operations team is unaware of what was specifically committed in the sale.
The customer experience starts on day 1 and both teams can't figure it out because the data that would give them insights into the problem is locked in two separate systems, and the two teams aren't looking at it.
A customer submits three support tickets over a span of 2 weeks. Each problem is solved individually by the support team. No one in sales is aware that this is going on. The renewal conversation occurs as planned and the salesperson shows up with no knowledge of the frailty of the relationship. The customer doesn't renew. Everyone is surprised.
Finance produces a Revenue Report. All numbers are derived from the accounting system. However, there's no correlation between CRM data and the sales pipeline which is in the system; no one reconciles the data until month end when the time to make useful intervention has passed.
These are not outlier situations; these are common situations. These are the regular occurrences of businesses with operational systems that are not connected.
Why CRM architecture is the right place to start
Most of the business activities revolve around the CRM. It stores the customer's history, the deals being handled, the communication history and the context of the relationship, which all functions depend on to perform well.
A good business CRM can be the nervous system of the business, if it's hooked up with the right systems, it's organized to get the right data, and it's set to return the right signals. Information is communicated to those who need it. Patterns which would not be seen are made visible. Teams begin to make decisions with a shared context.
A poorly designed (or no designed) CRM becomes a burden to record information and no one likes it, everyone hates it. It has to be somewhere in there. That's another story altogether when it comes to the reliable finding.
The difference is NOT about the CRM used by a business. It's just how the CRM has been designed to operate within the business.
The four architectural failures that create blind spots
There are four problems with the architecture of most CRMs that cause their operating blind spots.
The first is data siloing. The CRM stores customer information. The accounting system maintains payment records. History of the tickets is stored on the support platform. These systems are not linked together, there is no single view of the customer. Teams operate under incomplete information, filling the gaps with assumptions which are often incorrect.
This is inconsistent data entry. If the data is entered differently by various users, some users completing calls, others not; some teams marking the deal's stage at the right time, others not, then the reliability of the CRM data is compromised. Reports with data that is not consistent provide results that should not be relied on.
The third is not automated. The CRM won't record handoffs that are not done via the CRM but instead are done via email or verbal communication. The next person who accesses the customer record doesn't know what the previous person did. The unity which is supposed to be present is lacking.
The fourth one is a bad permission/visibility design. If the support team can't view sales notes or the sales team can't view open tickets, the architecture is actively blocking the cross-functional visibility needed to eliminate blind spots.
This is typically not done on purpose but rather as a consequence of the system being set up without consideration of who sees what.
What good CRM architecture looks like in practice
Getting CRM architecture right, is a design exercise, not a configuration exercise. In contrast, the questions to ask in advance are operational: who needs to see what; when are handoffs involved, and what information should be moved across the loop; which team should take action on what signals in the CRM; what needs to be included in a complete customer view?
If these questions can be answered easily, then the configuration process becomes easy. Customer records are designed to store all relevant information that any team requires. Workflows are set to automatically flow when a deal moves to a new stage, a ticket is opened, or an invoice is past due.
Dashboards are not designed to be generic reports that reveal nothing, but rather, they are created for the decisions that each team will make.
The remaining gaps are filled by integration with neighbouring systems. If the CRM integrates natively with the accounting software, the salesperson will be able to view the payment status on the deal record without leaving the CRM platform.
When linked to the support platform, the support agents will be able to view the entire commercial relationship of the customer before interacting with the ticket. Once it is integrated with the marketing platform, the sales team will be made aware of which marketing campaigns a prospect has interacted with prior to their initial conversation.
This kind of integration is not an added convenience for the technologist. For organizations that have felt the impact of an operation with blind spots, it is a no-brainer.
Why Zoho is well suited to this architecture
The challenge of integration that most businesses experience is difficult and exactly because their present tools were picked independently and without taking into account how they would connect. Every tool has a data model, its API, and its logic about what the customer's data should be.
Zoho's architecture addresses this challenge in a different way. All the components of the Zoho Suite share a common data layer. If a customer record is already present in Zoho CRM, it appears in all other Zoho applications as well without custom integration.
Sales Rep's customers are the same in Zoho Desk as tracked by the Support agent in Zoho CRM. The invoice in Zoho Books is associated with the deal which it was created from. The campaign engagement in Zoho Campaigns will appear in the CRM timeline.
Blind spots close because the systems are not disconnected. They were intended from the outset to share information with each other.
For enterprises aiming for this type of unified customer view, using a stitched-together stack requires continuous integration efforts that are fragile. For businesses using Zoho as their platform, this is just the first step of the project.
Getting the architecture right from the beginning
A good CRM design is not guaranteed. The typical sequence goes like this: a company launches a CRM, imports their contacts, and begins using it for the most critical use case – pipeline tracking. The deeper architecture work is deferred, the more it remains deferred, since the cost of deferring it is not immediately apparent.
The cost is highlighted when the data is not consistent, when integrations that were never created are now mandatory, when the teams who are supposed to use the CRM have developed their own workarounds which nobody wants to lose, and when the 'blind spots' that the CRM was supposed to remove are entrenched.
A business with a team of experts from Zoho Consulting Solutions tackles the architecture, initially. No configuration is performed before the conversation starts with business process mapping: how deals move, how customers are served, how teams hand off to each other. The CRM is based on those processes and not the processes being shaped to fit whatever the default CRM setup is.
The initial cost is a reality. So is the payoff.
The blind spots that disappear
A business without a proper architecture and built around a CRM software becomes plagued with problems.
No communication loss with deals due to handoffs since handoffs are automated and recorded. Support team members no longer slip through gaps in the support or experience issues where they aren't even aware of the commercial relationship they are supporting.
The pipeline data is reconciled with the financial data in real time, giving more reliable revenue forecasts. New employees are brought up to speed quicker as the full history of customers is on their first day's desk.
There's no drama to this whatsoever. It's not at all conspicuous. It's the subtle enhancement of its performance that is gained by understanding exactly what is going on in the business - and by the architecture that enables that understanding.
It's like you've taken blind spots away. No breakthrough at all. A succession of events which never happen again.
You must be logged in to post a comment.