CRM Pilot Scorecard: Test a Real Workflow Before Committing

Set up a bounded pilot

Use fictional data and agree who will assess each task. Define required behaviour before seeing the result. Separate commercial eligibility, permissions and functional capability: failure in one does not establish success or failure in the others.

Copy these columns into a worksheet: task | expected result | observed result | evidence | pass/fail/unresolved | owner of follow-up. An unresolved task is not a pass.

Six tasks to exercise

1. Receive: create a synthetic enquiry and preserve its request context.
2. Assign: identify an owner and next action another colleague can understand.
3. Continue: have a second authorised person find the record and continue without a private explanation.
4. Restrict: check a role that should not access or change the same record.
5. Hand over: move an agreed opportunity toward delivery while preserving scope and open prerequisites.
6. Retrieve: inspect a supported export or retrieval route and check the relationships you need to retain.

Adapt the list to your actual work. Do not assume a provider implements every task in the same way.

A fictional acceptance result

Task: a colleague covers the owner’s absence. Expected: they can find the customer request, next action and actual commitment with their own account. Observed: they can open the contact but cannot identify the next action.

Result: unresolved workflow gap. Determine whether configuration, missing content or absent capability explains it. “Contact screen opened” is not enough to mark the whole task passed. No product is being scored by this invented example.

Decide from the gaps

Before a purchase decision, distinguish essential unresolved tasks from optional improvements. Stop the pilot if data isolation or unauthorised access behaves incorrectly; do not compensate for that with an attractive feature score.

Record the setup and product version where relevant. A seller’s statement is evidence of a claim, not of successful execution. The useful output is a shortlist of proven tasks and explicit conditions, rather than an unsupported percentage score.