What is CRM Success?

In our view, a CRM system is a success if it accomplishes several organizational goals

• Smooth out the process
• Improve the "corporate memory"
• Keep things from slipping through the cracks
• Provide effective management insight

Participation is the Key to CRM Success

Note that we say "participation" instead of "compliance". That's intentional... Compliance is often achieved at gun point, with users going through the motions and "checking the boxes" because they're told they have to. We want something more. We want users to participate because they can see that it's the "Right Thing To Do", and that it's an effective use of their time.

Users won't want to participate if a system seems complicated, hard to learn, hard to navigate, too rigid, or generally inefficient. They'll get frustrated and/or cynical. They may go through the motions, but they won't really participate.

Usability is the Key to Participation

Usability implies two things: functionality and efficiency. If the system does what it needs to do, and lets users find what they need and get in and out quickly, it gets good marks on usability. In a word, it's EASY. Users won't find the system frustrating, intimidating, or a chore to use, and they'll spend less time on the "How" and spend more time on the "What" and "Why", thereby making the transition from users to participants.

What Makes OppTuna Easy?

It's all about usability! But two things in particular...

• Simplicity -- Our interface is much less cluttered than Salesforce or SugarCRM, for example. Why is that? Because they seem to feel that feature count is more important than usability. Remember when Google first came out, how impressed you were that they concentrated on the important stuff and left everything else out? We remember that too.
• Functionality -- With all the emphasis on features, many CRM systems have lost sight of what's important. We focused on figuring out what things people want to do most often, and what their mindset is when they're doing them (we call these "use cases"). We made the functions that satisfy these use cases easy to find, easy to get to, and easy to use. If we didn't find a compelling use case for a function, we deleted it, or at least moved it out of the way.