The dark side to implementing a CRM
I mostly I write about the benefit of implementing Zoho CRM to business. In this article we will talk about the potential downsides from digitising your business.
Everything comes with trade-off’s. When it comes to technologies like Zoho, CRM is no different.
The invention of watches and clocks gave us the benefits of much better planning and time management, but with the trade-off of our ability to intuitively gauge time without it. With GPS and Google Maps on our smartphones, we gained the ability to get to places without getting lost, but with the trade-off of losing our ability to navigate without it.
Zoho CRM can substantially improve most businesses. It collects relevant data about the performance of your sales team, gets great feedback about your staff members, and control over the most important metrics of your business.
But what did we trade off for this?
After nine years setting up and deploying Zoho CRM we have noticed, in some cases, a degradation of ability of management to have empathy with staff members.
In our observation there are three big contributors that impact the ability to have empathy with staff members:
- Distance
- Looking only at data without context
- Only communicating by email and messaging
These three create the perfect environment where cohesiveness and empathy is lost. Not sitting face to face and interacting with each other. This in our opinion is critical for team building and cohesiveness.
It is easy to be harsh with each other when the communication is cold, conversely it is also very easy to apologise and say sorry by text when you are not face to face to the person you are talking to. It removes the genuine nature of certain important interactions.
When we interact with people directly, there are many things that occur that are very different from online. Human contact is the most important thing for developing empathy and, while we preach efficiency it’s important not to lose ourselves in our ultimate goals of creating the best businesses we can. And that includes a positive and inclusive working environment for everyone.
