How to Track CRM Usage & Analyze User Engagement

CRM software is among the most widely used types of SaaS platforms, with companies investing millions of dollars in CRMs each year. However, data quality and team member adoption often lag behind expectations, resulting in wasted resources and missed opportunities to better serve customers and meet KPIs.

For a successful CRM implementation (or other change-related initiative) that increases seller efficiency, you must begin by tracking CRM usage. Tracking your seller’s behavior when interacting with your CRM is foundational to unlocking its ROI, improving pipeline visibility, and optimizing CRM workflows.

Your team will need to create organizational understanding around how different roles use the CRM when it comes to their various workflows – where is there optimal engagement on your team? Where are your employees experiencing friction? By monitoring CRM data, you can answer these questions to identify opportunities for improving the CRM experience.

In this guide, we’ll cover the benefits of tracking CRM usage on your team, which metrics to track and how, and most importantly, how to use all of this data to drive CRM adoption and optimal team performance.

Why CRM Usage Tracking Matters

In this section, we’ll go through the primary benefits of tracking your team’s CRM usage and creating an actionable strategy around your findings.

1. Maximize your full ROI of your CRM

When choosing a CRM, your team likely analyzed features and functionality in detail, ultimately selecting a platform that maximized productivity and helped employees reach their goals to the benefit of your customers.

However, if your team doesn’t utilize the features and functionality that you prioritized in your search, you won’t get the efficiency and quality gains that you were hoping for.

Tracking employee usage of your CRM gives visibility into usage and alerts you to underutilized features, helping you reduce software waste and eliminate shadow tools. By shining a light on these issues with data, you’ll be well-positioned to take action so that your team can have higher sales productivity and more accurate pipeline forecasts.

2. Improve user adoption and reduce friction

If you use a tool such as Whatfix Product Analytics to track CRM usage, you’ll be able to use Flows to understand where your reps are struggling, skipping steps, or underutilizing key workflows.

When you identify points of user friction negatively impacting CRM adoption, you can react by:

• Improving CRM user onboarding for team members in the future, giving better training and hands-on practice where your employees tend to struggle with or ignore elements of your CRM.
• Offering continuing education opportunities, such as additional CRM user training or better self-serve resources, to employees who have already been onboarded to the CRM but need some additional knowledge to fully utilize the CRM.

When you monitor usage, you can quickly identify user adoption issues or friction points, react to them, and increase the time-to-productivity for all your employees using your CRM.

3. Increase data quality and pipeline confidence

When your employees don’t utilize all aspects of your CRM, data quality suffers. This is a critical issue because incomplete or inaccurate CRM data undermines downstream systems, such as analytics, pipeline forecasting, customer health, and revenue reporting.

By monitoring CRM usage and reacting to your findings, you’ll have cleaner,  higher-quality CRM data that allows your leadership team to make better strategic decisions and engage in more effective coaching of internal teams.

4. Align sales tools to rep behavior

Just like product analytics provides insight into customer behavior, your CRM analytics highlight how your reps actually work versus how you think they work. This is important because it’s your reps who are on the front lines with your customers, and they typically fall into certain habits for specific reasons.

With comprehensive CRM usage data, you’ll understand what your employees are doing in all of their workflows. You can initiate conversations and strategy sessions with your team to understand their perspectives and work together to improve overall productivity.

By understanding your team’s behavior and strategizing around their habits and concerns, you can optimize CRM usage in a way that reduces time-on-task metrics, helps you identify feature or flow bloat, and/or eliminates unnecessary steps for increased efficiency.

5. Support change management and process rollout

CRM usage metrics provide a useful feedback loop each time you iterate on your sales strategy or key workflows. For example, if you migrate to a new CRM or make significant changes to your sales pipeline workflows, your CRM metrics will let you know if and when your team’s efficiency lags in the process.

Rather than waiting for employee feedback or for customer KPIs to be affected one way or another, you can stay on top of your usage metrics to spot issues or successes in real time.

How to Track CRM Usage Effectively

Tracking CRM usage so that your data is reliable and actionable requires a strategy. In this section, we’ll go through our top tools and tips for effective behavioral tracking and monitoring.

1. Built-in analytics in CRM platforms

First, it’s important to check what analytics and reporting options you have within your CRM itself. Tools such as Salesforce Lightning Usage App, Microsoft Dynamics Admin Center, and Oracle CX’s Usage Tracking can track usage to an extent.

Native tools like these often offer tracking for:

• Page views for different pages of the CRM
• Number of CRM logins within a given time period
• Number of users who switch from one version of the CRM to another
• Total number of users who are using specific areas of your CRM
• Information about which browsers or devices your team uses to access different areas of the CRM

While these are great top-line metrics to give you a high-level view of your team’s CRM usage, your overall strategy will require deeper analytics alongside them to be truly actionable.

2. Third-party platforms for deeper tracking

Your team will want to take a look a third-party platforms that give you a much more nuanced look at CRM usage on your team. Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) such as Whatfix DAP go beyond login data to help you track precise interactions, click paths, and workflow completions.

With Whatfix, you can implement no-code event tracking to monitor, benchmark, and analyze an CRM user action, allowing you to visualize your tasks and workflows as Funnels and identify where user dropoff is occurring with Journeys.

With a dynamic third-party platform like Whafix, you can also utilize features such as Whatfix Cohorts in Product Analytics to see these detailed metrics for different teams and roles at your organization. These insights enable CRM application owners and department leaders to take a data-driven approach to improving CRM experience, ultimately enabling sellers with frictionless sales tasks and processes that help them close deals faster.

Another primary benefit of using a third-party platform is cross-CRM and hybrid-stack visibility across tools like additional CRMs, a learning management system (LMS), and your support portal.

This level of detail, along with data visualizations and easy-to-read dashboards, helps your team understand exactly what your team is doing and where they may be struggling or failing to adopt key functionality.

3. In-app analytics and behavior tracking

With a robust product analytics platform, you’ll be able to look at real-time in-app analytics and behavioral tracking, which will then inform your strategy for increasing adoption and efficiency on all teams that utilize your CRM.

Within a platform such as Whatfix Product Analytics, you can track:

• Actual rep behavior in real time: Take a look at how your team is utilizing your CRM today, in addition to comparing it to other periods. For example, it can be useful to understand this month’s behavior compared to last. Is adoption increasing? Has friction been resolved?
• Flow completion: To what extent is your team completing key flows? Do they struggle with completion? The answers to these questions can help you understand the extent to which your team can manage their key workflows in your CRM.
• Drop-off points and rates: You can understand where your employees typically drop off, which is a key indicator of friction that needs to be addressed. You can also see the extent of the problem, with metrics that tell you what percentage of your team drops off at any given point in a flow.
• Effectiveness of your on-platform guidance: You’ll be able to know which guidance elements, such as in-app tooltips, your team engages with. This can give you some idea as to whether or not you’re giving your reps help in the moments that they actually need it.

4. Survey + feedback data

One of the most useful benefits of using a third-party platform for your CRM usage tracking is the ability to collect qualitative insights from your team alongside your data points.

You can implement short, effective survey questions directly in the flow of work that ask your reps what’s working, what’s difficult, to what extent they have the knowledge they need, and more.

These qualitative insights give more shape to the quantitative metrics that you’ll be tracking. Together, you can form a complete picture of your team’s interaction with your CRM that helps you create action items likely to influence internal efficiency and satisfaction.

With Whatfix, sales organizations can integrate in-app surveys into their CRM experience, helping to collect qualitative data from sellers on areas they’re struggling with and recommendations for how to improve the platform and its tasks and workflows.

CRM Usage Metrics & KPIs to Monitor

Once you’ve decided on a third-party platform, it’s time to zero in on precisely which metrics to track. In this section, we’ll go through the key CRM usage metrics that are likely to result in your ability to iterate on your team’s CRM experience for increased productivity.

1. Completion rates for key workflows

Track how many users start and complete guided flows or CRM actions such as opportunity creation, quote submissions, and other key moments in your pipeline. A completion rate on the lower end of the spectrum could indicate that your team is struggling and needs clarification, on-platform guidance, or additional training.

2. Time-to-completion and time-in-UI

Monitor how long reps take to complete tasks, and pay particular attention to long and clunky workflows. Doing this has two key benefits:

• It helps you uncover points of friction in complex workflows, so you can address any knowledge or skill gaps on your team.
• It gives you a sense of how long it takes your team to complete flows and how that changes over time. You can make sure that nothing is slowing down your reps, and also set time-based goals that can motivate your team to work more efficiently.

3. Field-level engagement

Tracking which mandatory and optional fields are filled out —and how accurately – can help you keep your CRM data clean and reliable over time.

If you notice that key fields are not being filled out at an ideal frequency or to your standard of quality, you can address it with your team before it becomes a systemic data reliability issue.

4. Click paths and UI drop-off points

By looking at specific workflows, you will identify where users abandon flows or bounce between pages, which is indicative of confusion or poor UX.

With these data points, you can address knowledge gaps and/or look for ways to improve the user experience of the flows in question, ultimately enabling your team to work better and more efficiently.

5. Error frequency

When using a CRM, there is always a chance that employees make errors while in the flow of work. This can happen when someone is in a rush or genuinely lacks knowledge.

Here are a few examples of frequent CRM errors:

• Incorrect or errantly formatted data entry
• Field validation mistakes
• Skipped or missed steps in workflow automations

If you monitor the frequency of errors, you’ll be able to identify where mistakes frequently occur and address the issue with your team before it significantly degrades the quality of your CRM data.

6. CRM login vs. active usage

While knowing how many employees are logged in and for how long is an interesting topline metric, your primary concern should be precisely how your employees are using the time they’re logged in to your CRM.  For this reason, you can measure actual engagement, which tells you how much time your team spends on meaningful task execution.

By monitoring active usage, you’ll be able to identify and address any issues related to employee productivity and help your team solve problems with time management or cumbersome workflows involving multiple tools.

7. Feature or module adoption rates

Since you chose your CRM partially based on the expected ROI of its various features, it’s important to measure and monitor feature and module adoption on your team. With adoption metrics, you can see which parts of your CRM investment are being utilized and which are not.

Based on this data, you can address the lack of adoption with your team, which is often a sign that more guidance or education is needed to make full use of important CRM features.

How to Take a Data-Driven Approach to CRM Workflow Optimization

Once you’re tracking and monitoring key CRM usage metrics, you’ll need to take action on your findings. In this section, we’ll give you some important strategies for optimizing your CRM workflow in a data-driven way.

1. Identify bottlenecks and process gaps

First, use your flow completion and drop-off rates to determine where your reps need better enablement or where processes need to be redesigned.

Once you identify these key efficiency blockers, you’ll be able to focus on exactly how to address them.

2. Personalize training and onboarding

One of the first actions that you should take when you identify CRM friction is to iterate on your CRM training and onboarding, and personalize it based on different roles.

This ensures that your CRM education, for new and experienced users, is based on actual usage behavior, not guesswork or generic modules.

With Whatfix, you can both identify areas of friction and then create embedded workflow guidance to target these areas. With Whatfix, create in-app Smart Tips to provide additional context to a seller or nudge them to take a specific action. Field Validations ensure sellers enter data in the correct format. Flows walk sellers step-by-step through complex or infrequently done tasks, helping them adopt the most efficient processes.

Self Help puts contextual support at your team’s fingertips—right inside your CRM. Reps can search for answers or step-by-step guides within the flow of work, without switching tabs or pinging enablement. And because it’s integrated with your internal knowledge base, SOPs, and LMS, Self Help serves up the most relevant resources based on user behavior and page context.

AI powers all of this behind the scenes. Whatfix uses AI to automatically identify friction points in your CRM workflows by analyzing user engagement patterns. It then adapts in-app guidance based on role, behavior, and historical usage. AI also helps train Whatfix’s guidance engine on your unique sales processes, ensuring onboarding and ongoing support are deeply aligned with your org’s knowledge and SOPs. The result? A faster, more intuitive CRM experience—and better adoption across the board.

3. Iterate CRM configuration based on real rep behavior

CRMs are generally customizable platforms, which means that you have quite a lot of control over the employee experience.

Use path analysis and heatmaps to see where your employees spend time, where they errantly click, and where they get stuck. With this data, you can improve page layouts, remove distracting clutter, and visually prioritize commonly-used fields and actions.

4. Monitor adoption of new processes in real-time

Most of the teams that use your CRM will iterate on their workflows from time to time. Your CRM usage data will help you validate whether changes to processes such as sales stages, lead routing, or qualification frameworks are being followed or have resulted in any workflow friction.

For example, you may find that drop-off rates or feature adoption have slowed on specific teams after making changes, which warrants further investigation. With this data, your team can quickly solve CRM related issues and prevent new, goal-oriented processes from being negatively affected.

Built-In CRM Tracking vs. Third-Party Platforms

An effective CRM usage strategy harnesses the power of built-in CRM tracking, third-party analytics platforms, and a digital adoption platform. In this section, we’ll detail how to utilize each in a way that contributes to your overall CRM workflow gains.

1. What native CRM tools offer

Native CRM tools help you keep tabs on high-level metrics like logins, page views, object creation, and admin-level reporting stats. While these metrics alone don’t give much nuance, a sudden change can prompt you to look further to identify and mitigate any major workflow issues.

Since CRM analytics often lack context on user engagement with specific workflows or UI elements, you’ll also need the support of a third-party tool if you want to take a data-driven approach to CRM optimization.

2. Where third-party platforms add value

Third-party platforms provide granular insights across custom flows, third-party integrations, and blended text stacks.

Not only that, but you can use a third-party platform to look at these detailed metrics by team or by role, which enables you to create targeted action items to address any issues in efficiency or knowledge.

Aside from nuanced behavioral analytics, a third-party platform can also collect contextual feedback from your reps to add a qualitative element to your data and offer in-app support when your team needs help.

3. Why layering a DAP like Whatfix makes sense

A DAP helps your team go from passive usage reporting to proactive guidance, strategic nudges, and workflow orchestration. One pitfall you want to avoid with a third-party platform approach is collecting data without actually acting on your insights.

Here are some examples of how the Whatfix DAP makes it simple to react to friction and other workflow inefficiencies:

• Use Self Help to continuously update your self-serve knowledge base that employees can use whenever they’re stuck.
• Create in-app messages that are triggered where drop-off occurs so that your team gets guidance where they typically experience confusion or friction.
• Use Surveys to ask employees for feedback on their workflows directly in the flow of work to help your team better understand why CRM users might be experiencing friction in a particular workflow.

With these functions, a DAP helps your team develop a closed feedback loop that continuously improves your CRM strategy over time:

Usage Tracking: Built-In CRM Analytics vs. Third-Party Tools

As discussed in the previous section, enterprise CRMs can provide general, out-of-the-box usage insights, but organizations can alternatively invest in implementing a custom event tracking tool to analyze user engagement alongside the basic built-in metrics. Let’s compare the pros and cons of each.

1. Built-in CRM user engagement tracking for high-level metrics

Specific metrics vary between platforms, but let’s take a look at some of the events tracked by two major CRMs to illustrate the nature of the data you can expect from your platform:

MS Dynamics, a CRM by Microsoft, is a robust platform with many different tracking options. For example:

• Logins and logouts by employees
• Basic, across-the-board adoption metrics
• Leadership and performance metrics between team members
• Data completion stats

Salesforce is another flagship CRM in the market with substantial tracking options. For example:

• Logins and logouts
• Locations and devices per login
• Record or data changes
• Basic event tracking in real-time
• Data-based security threat detection

If you use a less robust CRM, such as a platform targeting smaller enterprises, you will likely find that it offers less tracking than market leaders like Microsoft and Salesforce.

It’s important to look at tracking options in detail when choosing a CRM so that you can understand what further data needs you have when considering an additional analytics tool.

2. Product analytics tools for nuanced usage data

With additional nuanced data beyond what a CRM typically provides, organizations can make data-driven decisions to improve workflow completion, increase efficiency, and better enable their employees who use the CRM.

Application analytics tools like Whatfix Product Analytics can be used to track any custom event on a granular level, while also helping teams with custom workflows and tasks related to any usage metric.

A product analytics platform can go beyond high-level data and provide metrics such as:

• Feature usage and adoption by team or role using Cohorts
• Engagement metrics, such as session time and active platform usage
• Click paths, drop-off points, and other indicators of friction

Based on these nuanced metrics, your team can plan action items. For example:

• Offer in-app guided assistance via the Whatfix DAP, where your employees tend to experience friction.
• Improve your self-serve resources based on what employees struggle with or where they are prone to error using Self Help, the Whatfix knowledge base within the Whatfix DAP
• Offer further training to employees using your CRM
• Iterate on your CRM onboarding to address issues that you uncover with usage data

Overall, the best strategy for getting nuanced data with actionable CRM insights is to utilize both the top-line metrics supported by your CRM, along with a third-party product analytics tool.

CRMs Click Better with Whatfix

CRM usage tracking is a critical element of your CRM strategy, driving rep efficiency, quality data, and pipeline trust. Whatfix is the trusted partner of top organizations when it comes to tracking usage and guiding reps in the flow of work, ultimately surfacing insights and driving adoption with less friction.

Let’s take a closer look at how Whatfix can take your CRM strategy to a new level of efficiency and productivity.

Benchmark performance and identify friction with Whatfix Product Analytics

Use custom user event tracking to look at detailed CRM usage and adoption metrics related to specific workflows, teams, roles, and features. Whatfix goes well beyond the out-of-the-box metrics offered by your CRM itself.

Whatfix Product Analytics is a no-code solution, and data points are visualized in a way that’s easy to understand. This enables your team to extract actionable insights quickly without the help of a developer or a data analyst.

Provide hands-on employee training with Whatfix Mirror

Whatfix Mirror enables you to create a sandbox environment of your CRM that is identical to the actual platform but does not involve interacting with real users.

This gives your team the ability to try out workflows, ask questions, and learn without the risk of interrupting key processes or causing customer-facing mistakes. Whatfix Mirror is a risk-free solution for CRM training programs, useful both for onboarding employees to your CRM and helping your team learn about new features and workflows as they surface over time.

Support your team in the flow of work with the Whatfix DAP

Your analytics don’t mean much if you don’t use them to take action. With the Whatfix DAP, you can support your employees at precisely the right moments in their workflows to save time and improve their experience with your CRM, fostering adoption.

With the Whatfix DAP, you can utilize in-app messages, product workflows, and self-serve resources to give employees further guidance when your analytics indicate drop-off or another sign of friction.

Like the entire Whatfix platform, the DAP is a no-code solution, enabling anyone on your team to quickly and efficiently iterate on your team’s CRM experience.

Take a continuous improvement approach to your CRM

The optimization of your CRM workflows and UX is a long-term initiative and an interactive process. With the right analytics, training environment, and DAP, your team can continuously improve your CRM strategy and outcomes to the benefit of your employees and your customers.