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What Can A CRM Audit Show My Business?

August 8, 2022
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CRM implementation helps you manage customer records to provide personalized services to prospects and customers. Modern CRM solutions help you automate storing and analyzing your business data to understand your customers better. They also allow you to track the behavior and interactions of your customers with your business to help you tailor your processes accordingly.

However, CRM implementation calls for a regular CRM audit. Just like a financial audit, you need an extensive CRM audit to understand how successful the implementation has been and what results from you have achieved with the same. CRM audit provides you with valuable information about your team's performance and helps you quantify the success of the CRM solution implemented by your business.

Before understanding what a CRM audit shows to your business and its importance, let us briefly understand the concept of a CRM audit. 

What Is A CRM Audit?

A CRM audit is the process of reviewing how your CRM platform is utilized over a specific period. It involves analyzing the technical aspects of using its tools and how they helped you manage your customers. 
A comprehensive CRM audit would help you optimize the platform and get the most out of it. Regular audits allow businesses to bridge unwanted gaps in their database and eliminate the resources that take up a lot of time without yielding results. With the help of a CRM audit, you can identify the flaws in the usage of your CRM platform and understand the issues within your business processes that need to be fixed. 

What Does A CRM Audit Show Your Business?

A CRM audit considers various aspects and parameters while reviewing your CRM platform. 

A CRM audit focuses on three significant aspects while assessing CRM usage, data quality, and process quality.

CRM Usage

A good chunk of a CRM audit focuses on the rate of CRM usage and adoption amongst the users, depending on the objectives to be achieved and tools implemented. If the audit report shows low CRM usage, you cannot make the most of your CRM investment. In such cases, it is essential to increase user adoption and inform your team members about the benefits of modern CRM solutions.

Here is what a CRM audit will show your business while checking the usage of the platform:
  • Number of text messages, calls, emails, discovery meetings, and site visits recorded over a specific period
  • Number of daily records handled by each user
  • Number of support tickets created and closed over a particular time
  • Number of members from your sales team having accounts in your CRM platform
  • The ratio between the number of sales activities logged and those that weren’t.
Data Quality

A comprehensive CRM audit would also provide you with a report regarding the quality of data stored and processed by your business. This would allow you and your team to identify potential customers and locate transactions that may have been miscategorized. A good data quality review would help you identify the issue with your system or personnel. 

Here is what a CRM audit will show you while assessing the quality of your CRM data:
  • Incorrect, missing, or incomplete names, email addresses, or contact details
  • Wrong, lost, or vague product details, sales stages, or customer types
  • Faulty classification of inquiries, deals, and requests
Issues with data quality need to be fixed immediately as they would end up hampering all your business processes through the CRM platform. 

Process Quality 

Along with the quality of your CRM data, a CRM audit also helps you assess the quality of processes carried out using the platform. Here, an audit report allows you to identify gaps in your processes and find ways to fill them in the best way possible. 

Here is what a CRM audit will show you while assessing the quality of your CRM data:
  • Tickets that are about to get overdue
  • Sales deals that are about to get overdue
  • Deliverable dates missed by the team
  • Data assigned to a non-existent or incorrect user

Performing A Comprehensive CRM Audit

To obtain valuable results and make efficient assessments, it is vital to perform a CRM audit correctly. Here are the significant steps involved in performing a comprehensive CRM audit for your business:

Conduct A Documentation Review

While setting up your CRM platform, you must have created a document wherein you made a list of the objectives achieved through the implementation. As you begin with a CRM audit, it is essential to review this document to understand the areas to focus on.

Conduct A Data Review

Once you are done with the documentation review, you can review your CRM data. Ensure that the records within your system comply with your country's data compliance regulations. If there are any issues regarding data management through your CRM platform, resolve them before going ahead with the audit. 

Data review also involves making sure that the data stored within your CRM platform is detailed and complete. Always ensure that your CRM data is updated, verified, and relevant to the users. 

Conduct Usage Assessment

Once you have reviewed your CRM data, you can move on to usage assessment. You will need to analyze how your employees use your CRM platform. Keeping your documentation review in mind, ensure your team members are using the CRM platform to move toward the goals you had set out to achieve. 

As a usage assessment, you can analyze various metrics, such as the number of leads managed, the number of deals closed, the frequency of user logins, and more. 

Perform Integration Testing

CRM platforms are often integrated with third-party applications and services to enhance the overall functionality of users. This stage of CRM audit involves assessing these third-party apps and services with which your CRM platform is integrated. Here, you ensure that the integrations are functioning per the intended objectives. 

Generate Reports

This is the heart of a CRM audit. You will need to generate reports concluding the analyses. You can create and share daily, weekly, monthly, or annual audit reports. These reports are powerful visual representations of your assessments, helping the management change the processes. 

Make Suggestions And Recommendations

A CRM audit is not limited to identifying errors and pointing out issues with your CRM platform. It also includes brainstorming and coming up with relevant suggestions to resolve the problems identified during the audit. Work in sync with your team members to explore the most plausible solutions to the issues concerning the CRM platform's health. 

The Final Word

A CRM audit provides you with a snapshot of the health of your CRM platform at any point in time. It also helps you understand how well you have used it to achieve your organizational goals. No matter how confident you are about your business processes, conduct regular CRM audits to continue providing CRM benefits to your business.

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