CRM monitoring Best Practices

06-Oct-2014 03:37 PM by Site24x7_Admin_US

CRM applications, a market that according to Gartner grew 13.7% in 2013, support sales and marketing operations that fuel revenue, so they are mission-critical to your organization. While the love-hate relationship between sales, marketing and your CRM system is outside the realm of IT (especially if your CRM system was properly implemented), there is one thing that you can do to facilitate business operations and gain sales and marketing approval. Ensure top-notch CRM availability and performance across Web and mobile interfaces!

Regardless where your CRM system lives, in your datacenter or in the cloud (for example Zoho CRM is 100% cloud-based so you get instant ROI, 0 implementation time, and no upfront cost) IT is the first line of defense when problems arise. Would you like to identify and resolve CRM issues before your users are impacted? Then you should proactively monitor your CRM applications (along with external Websites and other critical apps) with Site24x7 monitoring service! Here are some quick tips to help you get started.

1. Identify critical transactions to continuously monitor. Put on your “think from a user’s perspective hat”, and map-out common functions used by your power users (sales reps and marketing pros). Or better yet. Schedule a meeting with your stakeholders to identify critical CRM functions from their perspective. For example:

For a sales rep: Open a record, log recent activity, update calendar, etc.
For a sales manager: Report on team pipeline, View team member, etc.
For marketing pros: Build a marketing dashboard, create a marketing campaign, etc.

All of these functions can be proactively monitored on a 24x7x365 basis with Site24x7. That way you can ensure enough capacity in your datacenter to support your users, or identify early problematic trends and call your CRM provider before your users are impacted.

2. Define monitoring locations. Consider key countries and locations from which your CRM users are accessing your system. For example, headquarters, remote employees, key states, and so on. That way you can assure optimal user experiences across all offices and identify geo discrepancies for remote employees early on. You can get here a complete list of Site24x7 monitoring locations.

~3. Decide polling frequencies. You should monitor key CRM transactions more frequently (e.g. being able to send a sales proposal is more critical than reporting on sales pipeline), since your revenue will be more severely impacted if critical CRM transactions slow down or stop working all together.

4. Define types of problems that should trigger an alert (response time violations, content accuracy failures, SLA violations...) as well as alerting policies. Keep in mind that while CRM speed is critical, content checking capabilities can help you identify critical database record retrieval failures much faster (especially if you have customized your CRM implementation).

5. Define reporting structure and distribution. That way you can measure and tracks SLAs, a must if you are using a CRM provider (so you can verify that you are getting the quality of services you are paying for). Plan to automatically distribute SLA reports to management and sales and marketing stakeholders to keep everybody informed and aligned. As you know, sales reps can be very vocal in your organization, so you want them on your side.

6. Plan for both Web & mobile CRM monitoring. Mobility is critical to your sales force, since they need fast CRM access on the go. With our new Site24x7 mobile monitoring, you can turn your mobile phone into a monitoring location and get insight into various critical CRM metrics (like availability, response time or downtime) for both mobile sites and mobile app, from an end-user perspective. You can even monitor mobile CRM apps from corporate LAN Wi-Fi networks, so you get complete visibility from within and outside your data center.

Are you ready to boost performance for your existing CRM system? Try Site24x7 cloud-based monitoring services (a service of Zoho Corp.) and get in control of your CRM applications.

Good luck with your CRM efforts!

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