Intuitive, Navigability, and Learning Curve

These are three aspects of evaluating a CRM. You may want to bear these in mind when you are in any software program, and defining what they are may make it easier to do your evaluation.

Intuitive or Intuitive Design: Most agents have a fair understanding of what this means. If you are on a screen and you want to do something, is it pretty clear what you should click on to accomplish it? Or is it hidden away and hard to find or figure out. For example if you want to import contacts, is there somewhere on the screen that you would guess, and be right, that enables you to do it? In this image you can see that if you hover over Contacts, the drop-down offers “Import Contacts“. If most of the maneuvering is that obvious, then you could say that the CRM is intuitive.

Note that the more features a CRM has, the more difficult it is to make it so that everything you want to do is easy to find and readily available from any screen. There is only so much screen real estate to fit everything into. There will almost always be some things that require a little more work to find. That’s why one of the things you do when you get a CRM is to go click crazy. Any time you’re on a new page, click on everything. See what’s there. You won’t remember it all at first but it’s akin to moving to a new neighborhood and driving around all the streets. Little by little you’ll start to remember where everything is.

Next – Part 2 – Navigability