Management

Say Goodbye to Your Legacy CRM System

Small businesses need modern customer relationship management platforms to help them stay agile and meet evolving expectations.

Teta Alim

Teta Alim is the managing editor of HealthTech. Teta previously worked as a digital journalist in Washington, D.C.

When customer expectations change, how can small businesses best pivot to serve them best?

Ideally, these business leaders would look to their customer relationship management platforms to scour the data they have about sales, marketing initiatives and customer interactions. But what happens when that platform is clunky, outdated and doesn’t really work as a single source of truth?

WATCH: Learn about the ServiceNow advantage to transforming the customer experience.

Many business leaders are plagued with data silos between different teams, clunky order fulfillment processes and complex mid-contract changes that should be streamlined with a CRM platform that can offer real-time data insights.

But if that’s not happening, it's time for businesses to rethink their CRM solutions, especially if they’re holding them back from staying agile and scaling new services. Modern CRM platforms have evolved from heavily manual systems to become more integrated with automation and artificial intelligence.

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Small Organizations Grow Bigger With the Right CRM System

As small businesses grow, the spreadsheets and disparate documents that once may have worked to collect customer data will only hinder the customer journey.

According to Salesforce’s 2026 Small and Medium Business Trends Report, 51% of small businesses use a CRM system. And while many of them are investing more in technology to gain a competitive edge, leaders are wary of tool sprawl and data inconsistencies across solutions. Growing small businesses are also more interested in AI capabilities.

LEARN MORE: Why the first 90 seconds of a customer call matter more than you think.

For small organizations and nonprofits, an integrated platform with automated features can help improve experiences for customers and for employees.

Atlanta-based The Battery Network (formerly known as Call2Recycle), for instance, deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 as a unified CRM and enterprise resource planning tool, which “allows everyone in our organization to have visibility into what’s going on. Without it, there would be so many spreadsheets that it would be a nightmare,” Technology Director Rob Latham previously told BizTech.

In addition, Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate allowed the organization to automate workflows and build low-code custom apps that connected to back-end data.

EXPLORE: A small business improves customer service with a modern contact center.

For YMCA of the North, which oversees locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the decrease in membership dues during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic led the organization to revise programming, but it needed a new CRM solution that would help it scale.

“We needed a CRM that could grow with us as we went into all of these new areas,” Tom Case, the organization’s former executive vice president and chief information and technology officer, told BizTech.

Small businesses shouldn’t be satisfied with a CRM that’s only working as a repository for sales contacts. They need a unified CRM platform that can improve the customer experience and streamline work for employees.

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