1. When you’re getting set up with a customer relationship management system, one of the things you need to watch for is whether or not it makes it easy for you to get everything into it. While the whole point of a CRMS is to track everything that’s going on with your customers and prospective customers, how easily can you do it? Most CRMS have the features you need and want, but a lot of them are so hard to use that you might as well not have these features at all. A system that is counter-intuitive and forces you to struggle with setting up the things you need is not a system that’s going to get used a lot. Not only that, but if you do use it you’ll always be worrying about missing some of the data that you need – and you might be right.

2. Your CRMS should make it easy for you to capture all the information you need to know about every one of your customers. Then, with a few simple keystrokes you should be able to recover all the details in a usable form so that you can effectively work with your customer. You want to easily be able to find out where a customer originated. Was it from your website, a newspaper ad, a radio spot, word of mouth, or where? You also need to be able to identify which ad or radio spot brought you this particular customer along with all the other relevant details about his or her needs. While getting this type of information out of a CRMS is often not too hard, what about putting it in? How hard is it to get all of this information into your customer relationship management system in the first place? A good CRMS makes your life easy because it’s created by people who understand what you need. It’s simple to find out what goes where in the system and to make sure it gets there. You should be able to enter emails, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings quickly and easily, without a lot of headaches trying to sort it all out.

3. If you can’t get the data into the system, you aren’t going to be getting anything useful out of it. The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” applies here, except perhaps a more apt phrase might be “nothing in, nothing out.” Make sure that your customer relationship management system is intuitive, so that you can not only get good reports and data out of it, it’s easy for you to get the information in there in the first place.