4 Features No Brokerage CRM Should be Without

As part of our ongoing efforts to educate our readers on how to become a forex broker, today we’d like to look a little closer at a key piece of every broker’s infrastructure, the CRM. Your CRM is one of those core systems that your business simply can’t do without, but it’s much more than just a tool for customer relationship management. CRMs are also crucial to the workflow of your various departments.

From marketing to back office, a good CRM allows anyone with the relevant permissions quick access to client profiles, history and any previous interactions they may have had with your teams. It also allows management to view how various departments are performing, by quickly generating reports detailing a variety of activities.

Beyond all these, CRMs can also capture data on individual client journeys that provide useful information regarding where in the conversion funnel they find themselves. However, if we were to narrow down the most important must-have features that every CRM should have right out of the box, they would be as follows. Read on for our top 4 CRM features!

1. Organisation Mapping
For your CRM to serve all of your various offices, departments and staff members, the first thing it must be able to do is allow you to create a map of your organisation’s structure. In this way, you can create hierarchy trees that formalise the various levels of authority within your business, as well as providing each member of staff with the relevant permissions required to perform their duties. Ideally, you want it to allow you to create an unlimited number of users at no extra cost, as well as offering you the ability to manage team members across more than one office or geographical location. This will become even more important as your business continues to grow.

2. Management Oversight
A good CRM should be able to balance the micro and the macro in such a way that it’s equally useful to a new member of staff with limited duties and permissions, all the way up to upper management wishing to gain a big picture perspective on how different departments and individual staff members are performing. This can include reports on anything from sales performance, retention rates, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and even the management and optimisation of PSP relationships by tracking successful or failed deposit attempts per payment processor. In essence, it should be all things to all people, from intern to director.

3. Lead Granularity
Another crucial feature of any CRM worth its salt is the ability to track incoming leads in a granular way at every stage of whatever conversion funnel they happen to be in. This includes the ability to record every interaction a prospect or client has with your brokerage. This allows you to manage the success of multiple campaigns, by monitoring how many leads each is generating, as well as what the quality of those leads are.

But more than just the ability to pull up accurate lead snapshots that quickly display all prior interactions, your CRM should also be able to create different workflows for how your team members are to go about trying to convert those leads. This type of flexibility is crucial as it allows a manager to experiment with different conversion strategies that can automatically be put into effect at the CRM level and picked up by sales and retention staff.

4. Gamification
Last but not least, any good CRM should allow you to introduce elements of gamification into your conversion efforts. Not all departments respond equally to gamification tactics, but outcome-driven roles such as sales and retention have been known to be given a substantial boost by introducing a friendly sense of competition. Public leader boards that can display the top agents per day, week, or month are a great way to motivate sales and retention teams, as well as creating a buzz around prizes and other rewards you can periodically offer to those top agents. Another useful feature is the ability to change the parameters of what constitutes the top agent this week or month as priorities change and there are pressing tasks that have to be completed.

If you’d like to find out more about what our flagship Panda CRM can do, or simply more about starting a forex brokerage, please don’t hesitate to contact one of our success managers who’d be more than happy to geek out with you!