Perhaps, the most commonly committed mistake relating to the deployment of a CRM system relates to the planning. Proper planning involves not only an evaluation and selection of features to be deployed, but more importantly, the documenting of your business processes.

On a sheet of paper, map out the various departments within your organization. Next, overlay the typical paths that the information takes between those departments as customer transactions are processed. Think about pre-sales requests for information, quotations, order processing, customer queries about pending shipments, and after-sales support and services. You are, in essence, documenting the workflow and business processes of your organization.

The previous exercise will also help you better understand the extent of customizations that may be necessary. Equally important, it helps you define a goal that clearly marks the point at which a customization can be considered complete or a feature can be considered ready for use. Too often, implementations drag on in an incomplete state because the end result is not clearly understood. Defining and understanding it in advance will help you avoid that pitfall.

Documenting your business processes is your first step. Next, you need to understand the manner in which data is shared throughout your organization in order to accomplish the procedure detailed in your workflow documents.

For each transaction think about where new information originates in your organization, and examine which other parts of the business need that information to perform their jobs properly. Jot down notes to highlight the information considered as key to delivering an outstanding customer experience to your customers, within your industry. Note the points at which the customer first interacts with someone at your company, or is entered into a tracking system (example, Excel spreadsheet, Outlook contact, and so on), as well as where they move within the business.

Now examine the CRM system and check various relevant modules to see if they keep track of all the information that you need in order to deliver excellence to your customers. Verify that the modules model all the transactions that are most important for your customers. Gaps in your CRM implementation should then become apparent. These gaps should be addressed by extending your CRM system to manage the information for those transactions. Also ensure that all appropriate employees always have access to the latest information about those transactions.

From time-to-time you will find that these gaps are not easily filled by the more basic approaches to extending your CRM system. You should document these potentially troublesome areas for later analysis, as later discussions with your staff may reveal that only a subset of the data is critical to delivering the level of service you are looking to obtain; thus, simplifying your customization needs.

It is also important to clearly document the manner in which you wish for such extensions to work. In some scenarios, moving data into SugarCRM will suffice, while in others, it might be necessary for you to extract data from SugarCRM, as well as insert data. Such scenarios bring up other potential issues, such as data conflicts and they also require a measure of planning.

When you have plugged all of the gaps with properly designed and integrated extensions to your CRM tool, you will have created what in essence is a customer-centric business management solution. The most noticeable result will be the elimination of the traditional islands-of-information problem that so many businesses (large and small) suffer from.

In case you are unfamiliar with this problem, (or are lucky enough not to have lived it!) data silos or islands is a term used to describe situations where a business utilizes disjointed systems to handle routine business needs, such as an invoicing system, a customer service database application, accounting software to manage the ledgers, plus contact management or CRM software—all working on separate databases. Customer contact information becomes outdated and out-of-sync between the systems. Data gets re-keyed two or three times—a technique not known for improving its accuracy. The business' competitive advantage, expenses, and overall quality of service, all tend to suffer under those conditions.

By producing your quotes and invoices from within your CRM application and data framework, managing customer support and operations from within the CRM, and by including your product and services catalog, marketing campaigns, and sales records within your CRM, you eliminate the re-keying of data. Each application also has direct access to the same (and most current) customer data. The result is also more than the sum of its parts, as now the customer service personnel can look at recent and projected sales history. Marketing campaigns can target those customers who have had a certain product line quoted to them. Many other inter-departmental synergies will also develop as you go along, often referred to as cross-sell opportunities.

However, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Some of the potential drawbacks of too much customization of your CRM include the following: