To help flatten the curve of coronavirus spread, businesses responded to government calls to work from home by enabling remote workforces.
Some organizations effortlessly transitioned to work-from-home.
Businesses already using customer-relationship-management software (CRM) as the hub for daily engagement with clients and stakeholders had an advantage—their employees were prepared to access essential business information anywhere on any device.
Business-as-usual CRM implementation involves significant planning, design, and development.
During the pandemic, your organization can use a rapid-implementation approach—taking quick steps to address critical issues and establish best practices.
A rapid CRM implementation can maximize your business data immediately to support your remote workforce and clients—during the COVID-19 crisis and after it ends.
Best practice: share information
Employees are adopting new ways of working to allow your business to operate during the pandemic. It is important to empower your staff by giving access to important information. A CRM can offer a 360-degree view of clients and stakeholders, and can be accessed anywhere, on desktop, tablet, or mobile.
Quick steps
- Create skeleton lists of key accounts and business contacts
- Import key accounts and business contacts, and share across departments―arm your teams with the data they need
- Share documents related to clients (directly on contact or account records)
Best practice: prepare for disruption
The novel-coronavirus pandemic is marked by uncertainty. On a practical level, you don't know when a member of your team might become ill or might need to care for a sick family member. It is important to support employees and to ensure client engagements can continue in any absence. Tracking activities, tasks, meetings, and emails inside a CRM can ensure other members of the team are able to step up and cover for an employee who needs to be absent.
Quick steps
- Input activities and tasks in the CRM to manage workload (document deadlines, client-support initiatives, phone calls, etc.)
- Create an activity dashboard to track the workload across a team (in a consolidated view)
- Prepare a contingency plan for reassigning tasks if a team member becomes unavailable
- Track and send emails (within a CRM, employing the contact and account entities)
Best practice: care for your clients
Communication is key during a crisis—communicate early and communicate continuously. Create a dialogue with your clients to address their needs. Take advantage of add-on functionality in a CRM system to quickly scale marketing and self-service rollout plans in response to COVID-19.
Quick steps
- Send targeted communication (enabling marketing functionality to use branded templates with personalization capabilities)
- Automate communication based on how your clients interact with your content and your business without burdening your marketing team (using pre-built automation streams)
- Connect a self-serve portal to the CRM to track and respond to questions or requests (allowing your clients to submit messages directly to your CRM)
Crisis to resolution: how BDO can help
A rapid CRM implementation can be accomplished in a crisis by following best practices and taking quick steps. To learn more about the rapid-implementation approach for D365 CRM and how BDO can support your remote workforce, contact Christina Dickie.