Spookie season is in full swing, and we still have to work. But some spookie things can happen, not even in October, but literally at any time. And it’s mostly relevant when you work with CRM systems because a huge amount of customers’ data, without proper management, can turn into a complete mess.

Common CRM issues and challenges haunt us everywhere. And the less experience you have, the more likely you’ll make a mistake, and the small problem will turn into a nightmare.

In this article, we’ll reveal 5 haunted CRM horror stories. I hope they'll help you understand common CRM hardships, how to avoid them, or at least deal with them.

Don’t be scared, they won’t hurt you if you’re brave enough to learn from others’ mistakes.

Story #1: When CRM Implementation Goes Wrong

“It’s a cold, dark night, and I'm halfway to implementing new CRM software for our business processes. I’m absolutely sure that the implementation process goes well. But wait, I’m almost done, and I can finally see that all those modules, sales funnels, automations, and other tools I’ve set up are barely working. But the real nightmare comes when no one of your teammates understands what to do with all those tools.

The next day, after implementing a CRM, I came to the office and saw that all departments were stuck, no one understood what to do or how a new system worked. Congratulations on me! My company has faced some of the most popular challenges of CRM implementation, and they’ll be haunting us for a very long time like a ghost“.

Lucky for you, it’s just a story, but it still can come to reality. First, let’s figure out all the mistakes made during the CRM implementation process:

• There were no professional implementation services.
• Lack of user adoption.
• Bad software pick.
• There were no implementation or adoption strategies.

How to avoid it?

Let’s analyze all the mistakes made one by one.

1. First, we see that the implementation was done by one of the employees. Maybe with some CRM experience, but experience does not really matter when you’re starting with new CRM software because new software means new challenges to handle. In that case, to avoid this common CRM adoption problem, you should consider getting some help from the company that made this CRM app or looking for CRM implementation professionals and business analytics.

2. The next problem faced was bad user adoption. But what does that mean exactly? In a nutshell, the CRM adoption challenge is a problem of general staff not being familiar with new software and processes. The reason of this problem is mostly in the following fields:

• Not enough staff training.
• Lack of documentation related to changes in internal processes.
• Not keeping key managers and heads of departments involved in the implementation process.

3. Wrong software is also a very common case of implementation challenges. To avoid this problem, you need to clearly understand the needs of your team when choosing a CRM. It’s better to discuss requirements with all departments, decide the features that need to be included, and also keep an eye on the possibility of integrating this CRM with other apps your team uses.

4. By the end of the story, we see that the whole company is stuck with new software. Even if the implementation went wrong, there is always a way to avoid struggles in the work of a whole company. You may probably wonder how. The answer is pretty simple. You just need to implement new software iteratively in all departments. For example, the sales department is testing the software first for one week. If there are no major errors, implement it to another department.

Story #2: Migration Ends Up With a Data Loss

CRM migration is part of the overall implementation process. If you’ve been using a CRM before, you should move your data from one software to another. If not, you should compose all your data from documents and Excel files to transfer it to CRM software. It sounds like it’s not so tricky, right?

But even a simple data migration can turn into the nightmare of every manager. Our next story is exactly about this situation:

“It was the finish line of our implementation process, and I needed to migrate the data from our previous CRM software to a new one. It sounds pretty easy with all those CSV import and export things, I thought…

I wasn’t so experienced with all that migration, and I haven’t checked if there are any backups to restore my data in case of errors. The process was a little rushed because of my boss, so all I did was download customer data to one single CSV file, and then I deleted our account to prevent data leaks. Thinking about uploading all that data to our new system the next day, I went home. The night was peaceful, but the real horror awaited me the next day.

When I got to the office, I turned on my computer and decided to check out the file with all the data. When I opened it, I saw that it was a complete mess. Some names had symbols instead of letters, and since we had more than 1,000,000 customers, it’s simply impossible to manually fix it. When I reached out to the support team of our previous CRM to restore data, they said that we’ve completely deleted our data and there is no way to restore it. I was terrified…”

How to avoid it?

Nobody wants to lose any worthy data because of human factors. To avoid it, always test the import and export of your CRM software. Before picking a new CRM solution, take some time to learn if there are backup tools available and how long the system can store the data after its complete deletion.