5 Signs It’s Time To Upgrade Your CRM Software

Many businesses face the issue of outdated CRM software. They invest in one software solution and want to keep it no matter how costly it is. When you bought it, your software almost certainly worked without any problems, enhancing your team performance and productivity. Like anything else to do with technology, however, software can become outdated and archaic over time. Not only can outdated software slow you down, but it can harm your reputation. Here are five important things to look for that may indicate it’s time for you to find a new software solution.

 

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Costly Outages:

Software crashes are a fact of life. When that software is outdated, however, crashes tend to happen much more frequently. When the system is down, it can have a significant impact on your ability to offer customer service as well as your employees’ productivity levels. Think about it – the ultimate purpose of having software in the first place is to streamline operations to make everything run in the most effective and productive way possible. When you’re dealing with frequent outages, the exact opposite happens.

 

Inadequate Support:

It happens to the best of us. The representative to your old software provider is practically attached to your hip….that is, until you paid him his commission. Then, just as quickly as they swooped in to buy your time and win you over, they seem like a distant memory. If you’re dealing with this lack of support, it’s probably time to upgrade to a newer Customer Relationship Management solution. More importantly, it’s time to choose a solution that offers unyielding, professional after-sales support.

 

Sharp Learning Curve:

One of the advantages to a newer software solution is that it is designed to be easy to implement and use. This would mean that it would be simpler to train on and faster to deploy. Older, obsolete software tend to be clunky and complicated, making it challenging to train new staff who join the team. The result is a tremendous waste of time and resources that could be better spent on other, more important things like business development and customer service.

 

Inaccessible Information:

If you wanted to know the email addresses you sent an email blast to last month, how long would it take you to find out that information? If you asked your employees how many calls they made today, how long will it take them to tabulate that information? For companies that rely on old contact management systems and spreadsheets that need to be constantly updated and reconciled manually, it could be a long wait. The pace of business is faster than ever before, which means employees across your company need immediate access to key data. Why not take advantage of this?

 

Redundant Tasks:

Outdated software often involves manual labour and redundant tasks that can simply be eliminated with the right automated tool. With the more up-to-date and sophisticated CRM software, you can automate almost any task, which means you can utilize your existing resources more efficiently. When you let technology do the heavy lifting, you free up your team to do more important business tasks, providing the opportunity to grow without the need to pay more employees. Not to mention, you eliminate the risk of human error which ultimately saves you and your company money over time. Voila!

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