However, before we get too excited about this good news, it’s important to remember that the UK economy is at the bottom of the G20 growth league table. To put it another way, the UK’s economy is developing at the weakest rate among its worldwide counterparts.

Productivity Growth For Small Businesses

But what do these alternative, less rosy numbers signify for small and medium-sized enterprises?

In sum, they suggest that UK firms will have to fight harder to attract new business, and client retention will be more important than ever.

Businesses must, in my opinion, go beyond efficiency improvements in their manufacturing operations if they are to attain these goals and increase productivity. They could consider digitizing their sales, marketing, and customer support departments. Every client’s touch point, no matter how regular or apparently unimportant, counts in this period of weak economic development; you can’t afford to miss a single chance!

As a result, given my experience working with businesses every day to tackle this exact difficulty through the installation of CRM systems, there is a critical battle that each and every one of them must fight at some point.

Taking Charge of Your Digital Change

Now, it’s possible that picking on these sticky little gentlemen is a little unjust because they have played a meaningful part in many people’s working lives. In fact, they’re a tangible representation of many of the CRM operations that we use. However, we now perceive the stack of paper notes on the desk as a sign of the issues that digitalization must address.

In this era of digital transformation, businesses that shed the many post-it notes with to-do lists and customer phone numbers in favor of an integrated CRM system are more likely to flourish in these challenging economic times.

Businesses can centrally record all customer information and touch points by implementing an integrated CRM system — by integrated, I mean a system that is used across the organization and interacts seamlessly with other critical business applications — ensuring that no opportunity to improve service levels and increase account revenues is missed.

Any contemporary sales activity is built on the digitization of client information and the resulting unified organization-wide view of clients.

Data Management with Responsibility

It’s also worth noting that, at a time when data security and privacy are becoming increasingly prominent in the public consciousness, CRM technology may help you win your clients’ confidence by managing their data responsibly.

With GDPR (and the related hefty penalties for non-compliance) being in effect, CRM represents a valuable weapon in your GDPR compliance efforts.

Then there’s the matter of to-do lists. This is where a company may benefit from the power of CRM workflow automation. Your employees will know precisely what they need to perform each day from the minute they log on by entrusting workload and task planning to the system and pre-built customized routines.

The Value of Employee Participation

You’ll probably agree that everything sounds fantastic, but there is one caveat to keep in mind. My experience delivering business technology has shown me that a CRM deployment is much more than just buying the newest and greatest new software.

Employee involvement is the single most important factor that determines whether a CRM deployment succeeds or fails. There is practically no aspect of a company that a CRM system will not touch, and that does not require data to be sent back into the system in order to achieve properly integrated operations.

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