Skeleton businesses score at the low to mid section of the CRM maturity model.

A typical company in this category has advanced the use of CRM from a customer data management platform to include the pursuit of tactical objectives. Skeletons recognise that a holistic customer view can’t be achieved within departmental confines and data siloes, so sales, marketing and customer service become more integrated. Customer data, workflow processes, and information analysis are designed to cross departmental boundaries and seamlessly share information needed to support and grow customer relationships.

Skeletons also consider how CRM integrates with other business applications in order to support user cases which span front to back office and thereby enhance business process automation, reduce cycle times, and enable closed-loop reporting. When CRM software is tightly integrated with ERP applications, customer-facing staff are provided a richer data experience and support for far more business processes. 

Ad hoc user adoption has been replaced with a user adoption strategy and is tied to productivity measures, such as increasing the amount of time salespeople sell or improving sales win rates. Activities will be prioritised and supplemented with workflow automation and bridged into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), customers will be segmented, the customer view will mature from a piecemeal data set to a departmental view, and the limited use of packaged reports will be replaced with role-based dashboards and custom reports.

Skeleton businesses want to build on the foundations they’ve already established and build a more ‘outside in’ approach.

You’re on your way and have a strong foundation to build upon, but you can drive significant business improvements if you put the work in.

In order to increase the productivity of your CRM system, Skeletons typically need to focus on:

• Becoming more customer-centric and adapting existing workflows to map end to end customer journeys, as well as establishing ‘what good looks like’ at each stage
• Improving and enriching the quality of data that’s held, and making sure it’s structured in a way that allows accurate and meaningful segmentation and reporting
• Increasing integration with other business systems so that a holistic customer view can be seen across the business, thus preventing duplication of work and delivering an enhanced customer experience
• Automating processes that create tasks or trigger workflows so that individuals can be more productive and focus on proactive activities
• Introducing SLAs and real-time alerts so that critical situations are identified and remedied immediately
• Working on increasing user adoption across employees through training and showing them the benefits of embracing the system