Over the past few months, my company has been involved in developing a new CRM system. We pretty much have our first version to a feature complete state. During this time, we’ve had one major customer who has been using it within their business. So, we’ve pretty much designed the system with as much communication and feedback from this customer as possible. That way we could aim to have something that is suitable for “real life” effectiveness in a real business environment.

What I’ve realised however, is that even with this level of feedback, the design is still lacking. When trying to use the CRM system within our own business, I find that there are important areas that just don’t work as well as they should.

What does this say to me? Well, I’m not really sure, but I think that those who design CRM systems should have this important feedback from their customers. Also, I think that they should have some skilled people who have knowledge about effective business systems and also program design. This would help the design to be as effective as possible.

By streamlining CRM software in this way, you get advantages like efficient business sysyems (for the businesses who use the CRM system), but also (from the developer’s point of view) well utilised software, and most importantly happier, more effective and growing business customers. Really a win-win for both sides.