I read a few salesforce.com blogs and one of the best is gokubi.com. The publisher is Steve Anderson of One/Northwest. His company is focused helping Non-profit organizations excel with salesforce.com. Today he touched on a key point with CRM. Everyone Needs Customization
No matter how good a system is out of the box, it must be customized so that your users can reach their full potential with the application. My experience is the same as Steve’s no matter how similar any two businesses are they each operate with their own unique culture and processes. These little differences drive the need for customization.
If you want your users to get the most out of the software/applications within your business you should add as much of your unique culture and process as possible. Customization will make the software become more intuitive and natural for users. These type of customizations make new software usable, when something becomes easy to use we all use it. The key to any successful CRM is 100% user adoption.
Here is the link to the post. Link
March 25, 2009 at 11:08 am |
Thanks for the mention, Chris. I’d love to take credit for founding ONE/Northwest in 1996, but alas I’m a relative newcomer, arriving in 2005.
March 25, 2009 at 11:34 am |
My bad! Corrected.
March 26, 2009 at 6:49 am |
Everyone WANTS customization. I’ll give you that. But do they really NEED it?
The best systems today are uniquely configurable to allow users to create new fields, new forms, new reports, all without customization.
Customization costs money; for development, for support, and for continued upgrades. Companies need to find the balance that makes the customization worth the expense.
The best example of customization I have seen is a a company that installed a CRM system and forced all users into an out-of-the-box configuration for 3 months. Only after that could they request customized changes. That forced them to forget their old system, and figure out how to truly use the new system. After the 3 months, the requests were well thought out and usually made sense. That is how they avoided recreating the look and feel of the previous system.