How critical is a dedicated CRM

Source: 2020-05-19

For countless years, businesses have been throwing around the acronym CRM, but what exactly is CRM? It all depends on who you ask. If you ask technology people, probably the majority will tell you it’s a piece of software that lets you manage customers. If you ask “old-school” service oriented business people, they will tell you it’s a methodology, a systematic approach of taking care of customers. The fact is, in today’s times, it is both, and more…

The Holy Grail

The challenge in our technology driven world is that we are all led to believe that a miracle piece of software is going to change our lives, change the way we serve customers and we are going to reap endless rewards by simply implementing this holy grail software.

Stop for a moment and think about what does CRM actually stand for… it stands for CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT. Now, since I last checked, and even with the latest artificial intelligence, humans cannot have a relationship with software; it’s simply not possible.

Take another moment and think about how many times you call a company for service and the person on the other end of the phone is rude, obnoxious and incompetent. The odds are pretty good they have a complex and advanced CRM in front of them, yet this miracle software simply doesn’t change the people and make them friendly or more service oriented.

People Deal with People

The fact is, up until about 25-30 years ago, computers were few and business people had to actually build relationships with customers without software. They spoke to them, listened to them, looked at pictures of their kids and slowly, they forged true relationships based on loyalty and trust.

Now, in our fast-paced world, we all tend to think that a CRM platform is going to build relationships and improve our businesses, but it’s not. CRM is simply a tool that helps us in managing our customer relationships and if we take a lesson from the “old-school” and apply their methodology with CRM technology, well then, that’s when we become unstoppable and a force to be reckoned with.

Jack of All Trades, A Master of None

One of the industries today that is highly dependent on customer relationship management is the forex industry. Besides needing to know basic information about the customer, having insight into how you acquired them, what they are spending, which assets are they trading, and most importantly, how to ensure maximum life-time value, is crucial and this is where CRM technology takes center stage.

Not all CRM solutions are built equal and FX brokers face various challenges with their chosen solutions. Firstly, they have been sold off-the-shelf CRM solutions with customization. Now, not to say this is a complete failure, but have the underlying business processes been fixed or at least defined properly? This is particularly evident with newer businesses that are still finding their feet. The biggest issue that most brokerages faces is they end up adapting the business to fit the software as opposed to the software fitting the business.

Just remember, bad business processes that get automated, simply make bad business processes happen faster…

The second issue that many brokers face is they keep adding more standalone bespoke technologies that often don’t integrate with each other. So now, instead of having a streamlined business, staff have to learn and manage multiple platforms and to spend more time trying to extract data and manage themselves, than applying this time to managing customers.

How critical is a dedicated CRM

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