What is the biggest mistake CRM users can make? CRM Records which are assigned to employees who have left the organisation. E.g., Leads, Opportunities and tickets which are associated with employees who have already left the organisation. We call these as Ghost Records. No one is looking after them. They are invisible to the entire team.
Since most of the users will follow up with their leads and tickets only, the records which are assigned to past employees tend to get unattended, due to which the company loses both image and revenue.
Terrible right?
Yes, of course, and it sounds very illogical also, that despite having a proper hand-over process when an employee leaves, how can we ignore the most critical part of our business, our customers?
Every company has a fair policy and process for the hand-over of ongoing work of any employee when they leave the company. Then why not extend that to CRM?
Why is this a big problem?
- No one is following up with those enquiries and tickets.
- Do we think that our customers will be happy with it?
- So, even after the implementation of CRM, you are not able to provide good customer experience.
How do we solve this problem?
To understand the entire concept, we have to understand a few things.
- How CRM users module works.
- Types of records in CRM
- CRM records reassignment rules when an employee leaves.
- Whose responsibility is that anyway?
- Reasons (or excuses) for non-assignment.
Let us deep-dive into them one by one.
How does CRM users module work?
In almost all matured CRM software, when a user discontinues, you don’t delete the user, but you inactivate it. There are very valid reasons for this.
There are two types of users in CRM:
- Active users:
- Only Active Users are allowed to log in.
- Generally, the subscription is charged on the number of active users and not the total number of users.
- Inactive users:
- Inactive Users are not allowed to log in into the CRM.
- Subscription is not charged on inactive users.
So, what should we do when an employee leaves the organisation?
- Just make their user inactive.
- Create a new user for the new employee.
- Assign the records of leaving employee to the new incoming employee.
But unfortunately, the last step is never done correctly.
To understand the logic of the assignment, we need to understand the types of records in CRM.
Types of Records/Modules in CRM
There are many modules in every CRM, and then there are Custom modules. These modules contain records. E.g., Leads modules include all the leads, and Companies module contains all the companies.
However, we can divide all the modules into three categories:
1. Masters Module
- Modules like Persons (or contacts) and Companies (or accounts) Product Master.
- These modules typically contain information which is kind of long term information.
2. Transactions Modules
- Modules like Leads (or enquiries), Opportunity (or deals) and tickets (or complaints), Contracts, Quotations.
- The records in this module contain information about ongoing processes—I.e. Sales and support.
3. Activities Modules
- Modules like Calls, SMS, Email, Visits, Meetings, Activity Module etc.
- These are activities that our team members do on a regular and day to day basis.
CRM Assignment rules when an employee leaves.
We should not reassign all the records of an employee who is leaving to the new employee. There are some rules, and then there are some exceptions. Here are rules of reassignment.
1. Assign all Master Module records.
- Records in Master Modules, need to be reassigned to the new person who will be handling those customers. This is because the new person (user) who is going to care for these customers needs to know that.
2. Assign only In process Transaction Module records
- CRM Admin should reassign only open or in process records in the Transaction Module. Do not touch the transactions which are already closed.
- That is because in future you want to know who had closed the deal.
3. Do not assign any Activity Module records.
- Activities done by the employee will always remain assigned to that person only.
- Do not change that.
Summary of reassignment rules of CRM records. All records for Master records, Only In process records for transaction records and No reassignment for Activity records.
Whose responsibility is that anyway?
CRM Admin and the team leader are jointly and severally responsible for reassignment for the same. This is part of the responsibility of the CRM Admin. We have a detailed article (with video) on roles, responsibilities and qualifications of CRM Admin.
As this is a very critical operation, we put two people responsible jointly and also severally. It means that if one of them is not doing it, then the other will complete the same.
1. CRM Admin
- CRM Admin is the person who is responsible for the successful implementation of the CRM. Not just technical but over-all responsibility of the CRM adoption and usage.
2. Team Leader
- The team leader is the person to whom the outgoing employee was reporting.
No one is working on the records which are associated with employees who have left. It means that we are ignoring the customers, because of our internal process. Can we do that?
How to make sure that this does not happen?
The CRM Admin or the Boss should keep an eye on OPR Dashboard regularly. There is an option to check My Team Dashboard, which gives an overall view of the entire organisation.
Conduct a self CRM Audit or get CRM audit done by Enjay’s team. We offer non-obligatory free service of CRM Audit.
Reasons (or excuses) for non-assignment
We have often observed that our CRM Clients give various reasons for non-assignment. Let us try to verify and justify them one by one.
1. The new person has not yet joined.
- Just ask one question to yourself before giving any excuse for not doing reassignment; will your customer wait for you till the new person joins?
- Obviously No.
- If the new person has not yet joined then assign it to someone else and start the process of customer interaction.
- But never leave the records assigned in the name of the user who has left the organisation.
2. We have not reassigned the records, but we are working on it.
- Do we want to believe this line? I don’t want to consider this argument.
- How do you track who is working on which records?
- How do we know that all the records are being followed up meticulously?
- This is not the correct way to handle the change in the team.
3. If we reassign to existing users, we cannot identify those records.
- People complain that “I am not able to identify my records and records of the other person assigned to me”.
- There is a straightforward solution to this problem.
- Let us say Amit Kumar left the organisation, tag all his available leads and opportunities as AmitKumarRecords.
- Then, reassign them to the existing users.
- Now we can quickly identify the records, originally belonging to the past employee.
4. These are old records, and we do not know what to do with it.
- One of the most common challenges.
- Many clients import lots of junk records into enquiries module, thinking that we will follow up this and generate some business.
- But the follow up never happens.
- Do we want to keep this garbage in our CRM?
- We strongly suggest that these records should be either deleted or marked as DEAD (or closed) or else we allocate proper resources and attention to process them.
5. We do not have permission to do that.
- Excuse not accepted.
- Take the help of CRM vendor immediately, but get it solved.
6. No one is looking at the Admin Dashboard.
- In Sangam CRM, we have an OPR dashboard, where we get to see a bird’s eye view of the entire.
- But many times, organisation, bosses and team leaders do not have time to look into it.
Conclusion
Allowing CRM records assigned to employees who have left the organisation is one of the biggest mistakes. If we seriously want to improve CRM usage and user adoption, then never ignore the un-assigned records.
Do you have any other idea, query or suggestion on the above topic? Do not hesitate to leave a comment here.
