How CRM can help HR to improve Employee Experience

HR team looks for HR tool to increase Employee satisfaction, motivation, and overall productivity. But, can CRM help HR to improve Employee Experience, sounds strange, but it’s true.

A good HR team will take care of interviews, appointment process, induction, training, payroll processing, automating and simplifying the process as much as possible, leveraging technology for it. However what about the regular work that the employee has to do to fulfill Job Description. Also, these days role of HR has evolved a lot.

Today, HR is no more about processes and Laws, its more about OverAll Employee Experience.

Changing role of HR

• HR is no more about rules, processes, laws, and compliance. It is more about Employee Experience, Job satisfaction, motivation, etc. HR team is also responsible for making overall operations smooth and stress-free.
• The role of HR has changed from supervisory and monitoring role to role of coordination, enabler and force multiplier. That will build trust, and the trust will boost teamwork and overall performance.

Its a Myth that employees need to like each other actually need to trust each other for their professional capability. HR needs to develop processes and deploy tools accordingly.

For all above reasons, HR needs to make sure that proper processes and tools are required that will bring the desired results like reducing stress, improving productivity, building trust and teamwork, achieving higher results.

How CRM can help HR to improve Employee Experience

A properly deployed and implemented CRM system will improve Employee Experience in more than few ways.

Increased productivity and confidence level

CRM, whether used in Sales or Support Teams, raises productivity and efficiency. Results are much faster, and that helps in boosting confidence and motivational level of employees.

Its a misconception that motivated employees are successful. Actually, successful employees are motivated. So HR needs to make sure that employees are successful.

Realistic sales forecasts versus targets

CRM helps Sales manager monitor the pipeline and do error corrections in real-time. Thus the focus shifts from Sales goals to Sales activities and milestones. CRM provides realistic sales forecast based on expected opportunity closure dates and estimated revenue. It can be drilled down to a very granular level. Thus Sales forecasts provided by CRM are much more realistic as compared to Sales estimates and targets set by Sales Manager and Sales Executives.

Bhagwat Geeta says, you cannot control results, you can only control your activity “Karma – कर्मा”

Reducing stress in Sales Teams:

You can manage Sales activities and not Sales results. Generally,  Sales Managers give figures of desired sales results and then. The sales team is supposed to achieve it. No one is talking about what is happening on field level, but if Sales managers monitor the ground activities and milestones made/missed the sales results will be easily achievable.

Also since the activities done by sales team are transparently recorded in real-time, there is no difference of opinion.  If there is an external factor involved for not achieving the results, the sales executive can at least explain that to The Sales Manager with proper details and proof.

Improving Sales processes from learnings in CRM

Sales coaching should be a part of the role of Sales Managers. But how do they know where the sales team is lacking and what mistakes are they making? CRM helps here by logging activities, sales process, customer journey and deal stages, etc. It helps in determining where the things are going wrong or out of direction.

There is difference between Sales Training and Sales Coaching. Sales coaching is something which is generally done onjob and its an ongoing process.

Faster and meaningful meetings:

In Excel days (or in the absence of your CRM giving your real-time results and notifications) Sales Meeting generally started with people giving in their numbers and then discussing what happened and why. Finally, if some time is left, then they talk about the next step and corrective actions. It is a mess and waste of time and resources.

Not anymore, With proper CRM in place everybody attending the meeting knows the numbers, even the activities done and milestones achieved. Which means that the meeting is purposeful, analytical and productive. Team members can focus on error correction and plan next actions.

Better coordination between Marketing,  Sales, and Service:

In any organization, there is constant conflict between the marketing team and Sales team. Marketing Team says that Sales team is not able to convert the leads that they generate. On the contrary Sales team will argue that they don’t get proper leads. It happens because both teams are using separate tools to measure their activities.

CRM can bring an end to this by providing proper analytical stage wise reporting with the appropriate reasoning for failure to convert the leads.  All these happen on a single platform – the CRM.

Same kind of conflict occurs when Support Team has to interact with customers and deliver them the promises made by sales.  It is because they are not clear what had occurred in the Sales process. CRM brings both these teams closer because they both use same platform and history of all the interactions with Customer are available to support team also.

Conclusion

Above examples are for the Sales team, but are equally valid for Support and service teams also. A modern CRM does not only mean lead management system or customer database, but it’s much beyond that. CRM helps to improve Employee Experience to a significant level.