Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
The Business Guide to CRMA complete ‘how to’ for delivering successful CRM
Brought to you by
2
Introduction 5
Making the business case for CRM 8
Ensuring a smooth implementation and transition
13
Continuous improvement and success metrics
23
Key takeaways 32
Contents
January 2017
3
Welcome to our guide to CRM – a roadmap for professionals undertaking a CRM
initiative.
The guide explains how to avoid the pitfalls in what can become an unexpectedly
formidable task and it outlines the simple strategic steps involved in a successful
CRM deployment.
With the right approach, CRM can be the gateway to a number of opportunities,
process enhancements and management insight and can result in increased sales
productivity, marketing effectiveness and improved customer experience. A well-
run, focused project will result in CRM that will help you respond to some of the
biggest business challenges in today’s marketplaces: rising customer expectations,
increased competition, new platforms of communication such as social and mobile,
and the growing number of channels your sales, service and marketing teams are
expected to work with.
In this respect, and in order to truly reach its potential, CRM shouldn’t be
approached with a ‘completion date’ in mind. CRM is a continuous activity that is
about the way an organisation works, thinks and behaves. The challenge with this,
though, is that this continuity is at odds with the need for technology projects to
have an end. Without definition of that end-point, or a phase within it, you’ll never
put the technology on the ground – it’ll go on forever and so will the associated
Foreword:
Jeremy WardHead of CRM consulting
At its core, CRM is the method bywhich everyone in your organisation
engages with customers.
4
costs. Recognising the profoundly separate dynamics and needs of CRM as an
approach and CRM as a technology will result in a successful CRM system for now
and for the future.
Other choices, like whether to put the technology within your own infrastructure
or in the Cloud exist too, but having a clearly-defined objective is the focus of this
guide. It is about understanding how to start a project, how to finish it, establishing
the necessary processes for change and creating an effective technology foundation
for ongoing improvement in the future.
We hope you find this guide useful and that it kick-starts your journey to becoming
part of the growing number of CRM initiatives being highlighted as ‘success’ stories.
Introduction
6
During this time, the concept of the ‘digital customer’ took form and the idea that
people no longer sought solutions to a problem, but experiences to match. CRM was
intrinsically linked to this ideal, as it offered new efficiencies to an organisation’s
customer-facing activities such as marketing, sales and customer service. It
promised to free up businesses to do what they did best: serving and solving
customer problems.
As a practice, CRM has evolved significantly since those early days. Gartner’s latest
year-on-year figures for the CRM software sector highlight that the market is in
the throes of robust expansion, with sales having grown 13.3% to hit $23.2 billion in
2014, an increase from $16 billion just three years previously. By 2017, this figure is
predicted to hit $36.5 billion worldwide.
The reality of CRM deployment has never been that simple, however, in 2013 it
was estimated there were only 14 million people in the world actively using CRM
technology, which suggests many businesses are happy to invest in CRM, but fewer
are able to implement the necessary processes that go hand-in-hand.
In his seminal book, ‘CRM at the Speed of Light’, Paul Greenberg refers to CRM as having ‘grown up’ during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the internet began offering a wealth of opportunities to businesses that recognised its importance and were able to reimagine their identities in the face of the digital revolution.
Introduction
7
Part of this can be attributed to a history of CRM failures. Gartner once reported that
around 50% of CRM programmes were failing to meet expectations. Things have
improved significantly since then, but research from Forrester has demonstrated
that CRM deployments still regularly encounter major obstacles, ranging from
strategic shortcomings, to a misrepresentation of business requirements, slow user
adoption and lack of a business-wide alignment of objectives. Then there’s the
technological requirements and perceived shortcomings, which account for a third of
problems in deployment ‘failures’.
Despite this, organisations continue to look to CRM as a holistic solution, and the
reasons for this are mounting.
A number of additional layers have been added to the building blocks of the early
2000s that make CRM systems more powerful and attractive. Social media has
changed the landscape of customer engagement to make brands more accessible, but
also more vulnerable to the viral effect of the customer voice. Data analytics tools
offer an array of new insights but data has become more complex and the number
of channels and touchpoints are rapidly increasing. Mobile continues to shift the
goalposts of what is possible across all business sectors.
All of this while customer expectations of businesses and brands become more
demanding. It’s never been more important to communicate regularly with your
customers. However, research indicates that customers are unlikely to be engaged
unless the communications are sent at the right time, are available on whatever
device they choose to access them on and contain the right message.
The power is now in the hands of the digital customer. The brands that understand
this and are able to derive competitive edge from rich insights, using them to
identify opportunities and risks and to anticipate what customers need next are
those most likely to be successful. The question is, how do you use CRM effectively to
bring all of these facets together?
Chapter 1:
Making the business case for CRM
9
However, it is important to focus on a small handful of key outcomes first and define
how these are achieved by the proposed CRM initiative. Essentially, what is the
problem that you are trying to fix, or the opportunity that you are trying to unlock?
If you are not clear on this, the project is likely to become the equivalent of a skip in
the street – a receptacle for passers-by to dispose of their every whim.
If done well, the business case neatly defines the problem to be fixed, and how.
During a CRM project, it’s easy to lose sight of whether and why things should be
done. If they don’t support the business case, they should not be done at all.
Forrester research highlights that inadequate deployment methodologies (40%),
poorly defined business requirements (25%) and a lack of alignment on objectives
(18%) were all key problems companies have experienced in their CRM initiatives.
The business case for CRM in your organisation may on the face of it be apparent, given the array of capabilities that it can drive. The power of the technologies available today makes it reasonable to expect to unlock immense insight from information very easily and to be able to streamline and accelerate existing and new business processes.
Putting a business case in place is often what determines whether a CRM system joins Gartner’s
50% failure rate or whether it prospers.
Chapter 1:
Making the business case for CRM
10
You should also be considering a robust approach to risk management at this point,
capturing threats to the project outcome, then applying mitigation activity based on
the severity and likelihood of impact.
c Your visionHaving a vision for what you want CRM to achieve is vital. A CRM initiative might
impact the whole organisation and its overarching strategy, as well as how different
departments will be engaged and how different stakeholders can benefit.
Being able to clearly articulate how you believe CRM will improve the business
will help get fellow employees on-side early. Applying your vision to a clear set of
outcomes and desired results will help you maintain this vision as your initiative
takes shape, and will also help you in the initial stages when you’re trying to get key
stakeholders on-board and through the project lifecycle.
Demonstrating and quantifying the business benefits will resonate with your
organisation’s executive board.
Industry view“In preparing a business case, you are essentially trying to make the case for
change. Typically, the purpose of a CRM project is to make things better, to improve
capability and to provide better understanding of customer interactions. Given that
that’s the case, it’s likely that there are restrictions to doing this in the current
environment – hence the need for CRM.
“Unearthing those restrictions may be achieved very effectively by exploring the
customer journeys. That exploration will reveal any weaknesses and fractures in the
business process being used to support those journeys. And thus identify how CRM
can be used to fix them.”
- Jeremy Ward, Head of CRM consulting, Xpedition
11
c What questions should your business case answer? In order to gain formal approval of the business case, it should answer the following
questions.
1. What is the reason for the project and the business change? This is essentially
the answer to the question “What problem are you seeking to fix?”
2. What are the benefits that are expected? If possible these should be quantified.
3. Are there any other options? If you don’t assess this, you will create a weakness
in your business case that an astute board will want answers to.
4. Risks? Is there anything that might happen that could seriously impede the
project or prevent the delivery of the outcomes?
5. What are the likely costs? Without this assessment, it’s difficult to discern
whether the project is genuinely worth doing.
Even with full backing from your board, a CRM business case is often made more real
by expressing answers to these key questions:
1. What does it mean for our customers?
2. What does it mean for our employees?
3. What does it mean for the business leadership?
The importance of understanding the issues and challenges around the current
interactions you have with your customers should not be underplayed. Do your teams
currently have the information required to readily respond to customer queries? Can
you provide a seamless experience for your customers, regardless of the channel?
Is time being spent with customers or on repetitive manual tasks? Answering these
questions will help determine whether your business case is truly viable.
It is also important to map out your customers’ journeys and the interaction with
your organisation, to identify that a CRM system is improving them in some manner.
12
c DataAsking basic questions about what shape current data is in and how it can be
improved is also critical.
CRM initiatives live or die by the work undertaken in the preparation of the business
case. It is critical to be fastidious, organised and transparent in its preparation, so
verifying and anticipating the assumptions and data your project is to rely on is
fundamental.
Industry view“Modern CRM software is sophisticated, flexible and easy to use. However, none
of that is relevant if the data held in it is wrong or out of date – incorrect decisions
will be made and reports will be inaccurate. Users will rapidly lose confidence and,
usually, it is the technology that is blamed.
“Asking basic questions about the shape of the incoming data for a CRM project will
help define the project properly and identify any major risks associated with this
aspect of it.”
- Jeremy Ward, Head of CRM consulting, Xpedition
Chapter 2:
Ensuring a smooth implementation and transition
14
c Single accountabilityA project that lacks an individual who is accountable for its success will not have the
necessary leadership. Projects, by their nature, encounter issues along the way and
the resolution of these can only be accomplished where there is someone driving the
project. That individual is the project sponsor.
The project sponsor is the person who has a vested interest in the outcomes of
the project. A CRM initiative needs to bring about change into the business and
so, to accomplish this successfully, the project sponsor has a number of key
responsibilities.
These include:
• Setting expectations
• Providing appropriate resource to the project
• Reviewing progress on main deliverables
• Helping the team understand the issues or opportunities that the project
addresses and providing direction, in terms of what success looks like.
Once a successful business case has been delivered, a CRM technology deployment must focus on the objectives laid out in the business case, along with an understanding of the hurdles that stand between you and a successful roll-out.
Chapter 2:
Ensuring a smooth implementation and transition
15
Ultimately, the project sponsor should own the success of the project and hold their
team accountable for the results.
c Executive buy-inUnfortunately, no CRM deployment succeeds without the full backing of your
executive board and that requires leadership buy-in.
Committed leadership will determine the outcome of a CRM solution’s adoption.
c Increase employee engagementJohn P. Kotter’s vision of change management [see ‘Maintaining the change’, page
21] revolves around the idea of giving employees something they feel differently
about. Given CRM is a cross-functional initiative, it is worth considering the tangible
benefits it will provide other departments, and how you might be able to broadcast
this to other departmental employees to ensure they stay engaged with the project.
Two good examples of this could be displaying to sales teams how your CRM will
provide more sales leads from campaigns, or showing customer service teams how
you can better monitor and act upon customer satisfaction data.
As part of a continuous improvement plan it is also helpful to be more visionary
in your description of where you see future productivity. For instance, how does
customer-related new hire information, industry news, social media content
and financial information sit alongside your corporate CRM data and improve
Industry view“Senior management buy-in is critical throughout a CRM initiative because
introducing CRM, as an approach and a technology, demands change in the business.
“In the early stages, the most important tasks are those associated with ensuring
that support from managers and team leaders is put in place, that the organisation
as a whole is aware and understands the need for change and to ensure that the
correct personnel are assigned to the programme. Without leadership, the natural
resistance to change does not get managed, manifesting itself in user adoption
challenges further down the line.”
- Jeremy Ward, Head of CRM consulting, Xpedition
16
productivity? Do you plan to provide real-time data from third-party providers
within your CRM application to offer new customer insight? If so, ensure employees
in service and marketing departments are made aware of just how this will improve
their current level of efficiency.
Other future benefits to consider are how you plan to drive more intelligence out of
the CRM system. Such as, how you expect to identify hot prospects for products and
services based on propensity, or how you, direct customer service issues to the most
skilled, available resource at the right time.
Again, having clear roadmaps to these types of goals are likely to help employees get
a feel for why adopting the system in the first instance will help them further down
the line. Maintaining your original project steering group to deliver these messages
is a must, as is providing an induction programme that focuses on maintaining
standards of competence, confidence and understanding of CRM in the context of
the business strategy.
c Understanding changeAssessing what is required to support your teams’ need to change is important; CRM
deployments can have an impact on all organisational departments.
This means that the number of organisational and departmental touchpoints a
customer has with your business should (and will be) increasing.
CRM systems can help bind data from these touchpoints together, but prior to this,
analysing an organisation’s ability to orchestrate a multi-departmental change
project is a good indicator of its readiness for a cross-department CRM deployment.
Political division and core purpose disagreements are common and should be
unearthed during an early stage of the project. Risks can be mitigated through clear
communication and expectation-setting across departments. It is also important
Data from Shopper Sciences states the average number of sources of information people use to make a purchasing decision
through their customer journey is up from 5.3 in 2010 to 10.4 in 2015.
17
that your executive team and ‘committed leaders’ are able to enforce the importance
and reasons for deployment.
Other environmental factors to consider include:
• Is the project competing with other internal projects? How much will this affect
your deployment?
• Is seasonality a key factor in your business? Does your project plan avoid peak
periods?
• Does the IT infrastructure exist to support the project?
c CRM championsWith CRM initiatives, internal project teams will typically be supported by an
external consultancy practice. However, members of a well-oiled project team will
often have the following, defining characteristics:
Being committed and having a vested interest are vital traits for members of
your project team. The most effective teams are made up of business leaders and
executives, as well as managers who will eventually be in charge of the initiative’s
success, and the employees tasked with using the system.
CRM Project Team
Pragmatic & open to change
Opinion influencers
Domain experts
Vested interest
Available & committed
Representative
Passionate about the result
18
c Piloting and phasing A CRM programme is transformational, relying on the right combination of people,
process, strategy and technology to succeed. Given the cross-functional nature of
any deployment, it is often regarded as an unmanageable risk to try and launch an
entire deployment all at once, and so a consideration of the options for phasing the
project should be incorporated into the business case.
Again, in this instance, it is suggested that a series of questions are posed to those in
charge of the deployment and executive teams:
• Who should have priority?
• Where can new technology have the greatest effect?
• How much change can users handle?
• Are you replacing a similar legacy system or are staff going to be using CRM for
the first time?
Industry view“What works well is where the departmental operational leads, or super-users,
are selected to work on the initiative and then maintain continuity throughout the
project – from design, through testing, end-user training and then to providing
support to the user base once the system is up and running. They become the
evangelists for the initiative.
“These staff are key to the success of CRM initiative since they are likely to
understand the existing business processes in detail, including inefficiencies, and
can therefore contribute to the successful design of new processes and tools. Since
they are involved in the detailed design decisions, it is advantageous to maintain
their presence through the test stage and in providing support during end user
training and into production.
“Having peer group support in the form of departmental leads helps to achieve
effective business change with team members. Those team members have someone
to turn to who understands the new environment to help them through the
transition to new processes, behaviours and tools.”
- Gina Timm, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Marketing Manager
19
• How much support can you offer new users during the phasing process?
• Once deployment is complete, how can you guarantee momentum won’t be lost?
Given the buy-in you’re expecting to have from executive board-level, it is also
important to take into account the level of scrutiny you’re likely to be under as a
result.
In your planning phase, it can be useful to identify a single department that
represents a quick win for deployment and use them in the first stage of phasing.
This is to increase the chances of delivering a compelling impact that will make the
entire organisation take note, as well as ensuring that there’s no loss of faith at
executive level when the initial phases of deployment are undertaken.
c GovernanceBy their very nature, projects introduce change. They tend to be risky because they
exist outside of an organisation’s normal practices. A successful large-scale project
therefore demands an operational structure and governance model that is separate
and different from the business-as-usual model. High levels of communication are
needed between all involved parties.
During the project lifecycle, changes to business priorities, requirements and the
environment will inevitably change and so it will also be necessary to factor change
control disciplines into your CRM project.
PROJECT DEFINITION
CLIENT CRM VISION
AND BUSINESS
CASE
UPDATED BUSINESS
CASE
PROJECT DEFINITION DOCUMENT
DESIGN PROTOTYPE
DETAILED DESIGN BUILD & SYSTEM TEST
USER ACCEPTANCETESTING DEPLOYMENT
DEPLOYMENT
TRADITIONAL RAPIDREPEAT FOR SUBSEQUENT PHASES
ITERATIONS USER ACCEPTANCETESTING
LIVE RUNNING & BENEFITS
Xpedition NAVIGATE
20
c Getting the sales team onside
In Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’, there is a quote that rings true about running
a CRM initiative: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while
defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”.
By putting all your resources into purchasing technology and initial
implementation, many CRM projects are not geared up to support the long-
term activity needed to reinforce usage patterns. The problem is, one of the key
usage patterns a CRM system requires is tied up with your sales team, which is
likely to be one of the hardest groups to convince.
How you get your sales reps to whole-heartedly buy into that type of project
is almost as vital as getting buy-in at executive level. Often, a regimented and
on-going training regime is necessary to ensure you win first, rather than
going to war.
There are a number of reasons training schemes fail, and these are factors that
all CRM initiatives should take into account in the inception phase of delivery:
• Training users on the product and not the business process.
• Delivering ‘vanilla’ training on a bespoke solution.
• Letting the wrong people deliver the training.
• Applying the wrong delivery model for the training.
• Assuming that training is only required as a one-off to deliver expertise.
CRM must be sold to sales people. Referring back to the business benefits and
‘quick wins’such as revenue, productivity and return on investment (ROI) is a
must.
Many salespeople will see your CRM project as simply a way to ‘keep score’, and allow
marketers inside your organisation to keep track of their campaigns more effectively.
21
Given that 2013 Jim Keenan research found that 78.6% of sales people who
used social media to sell found they out-performed those who weren’t using
social media, it is worth incorporating the advances a CRM adds in the use of
social – and mobile for that matter – into the mix. A 2013 study from Nucleus
Research, for instance, found that mobile access to CRM applications increased
salespeople’s productivity by 15%.
Alongside a comprehensive training programme, it is also worth considering
how your project plans to absorb feedback from your sales team at various
stages. Listening to the needs of your salespeople and acting on complaints will
be vital in keeping them on-side. An incentivising scheme may be the best way
of celebrating milestones and rewarding diligent usage.
c Maintaining the changeThe transition of the technology into production is the tipping point in which
your business’s investment in planning, analysis, process design and solution
development begins to be translated into the economic benefits set out in your
business case.
These days, CRM technology can cope with huge amounts of complex logic
in the way that it behaves. Therefore, the challenge is not so much about
identifying the limitations of the software as it is about working out what is
really needed and what level of complexity is digestible.
Communication and support for users through the process of bringing about
change into an organisation is critical. Users need to clearly understand
why their processes or tools are changing and where to go to get advice and
support. They need to have time invested in them in order that they become
both knowledgeable and skilled and, ultimately, they should be rewarded for
keeping going! The easiest trap to fall into is when, particularly under pressure
or from a lack of support, users revert to old tools or processes.
Highly-dynamic organisations often fall into this trap. Hunger to address the
next challenge and next set of changes often results in senior management
failing to reinforce and reward the new behaviour because they’re already
involved with the next project. What is really needed is for senior management
to show leadership and guidance so that people can, essentially, dive off the
diving-board.
22
Change management expert, John P. Kotter’s influential book, ‘The Heart of
Change’ sums up the importance of having a change management model in
place, by stating that positive change can only happen when you make people
feel differently, as opposed to encouraging them to think differently:
“People change what they do because they are shown a truth that influences
their feelings,” Kotter states. How you communicate key facts and figures
associated with your CRM deployment to different teams and employees will go
a long way to determining how successfully they take to adopting new practices
and getting a ‘feel’ for the project.
Piloting and phasing are options when considering the size and complexity of the
change. Planning how you can phase user adoption of your system in a structured way
will almost certainly help reduce the amount of pressure created by change, and make it easier
to embrace the new technology involved.
Chapter 3:
Continuous improvement and success metrics
24
Once the CRM technology toolset is up and running and available, the chief mantra
you should abide by is to “never rest on your laurels”. Just as Paul Greenberg refers
to traditional CRM as having evolved to become social CRM and then a platform for
customer engagement, so an organisation’s CRM deployment should be centred
around the core understanding that time, growth and change must be factored in to
the initiative’s plans, in order to allow the project to ever be deemed a success.
Critical to this evolution is having a process of continuous improvement in place.
When a system is live, you’ve hit a milestone, as opposed to the finishing line.
Getting to grips with this concept will help define a continuous improvement
programme that involves iterative steps towards specific, evolving objectives.
c Establishing influencesMarkets and competitors will never stand still, and nor will the expectations of your
customers.
A CRM system will not drive measurable business benefits on its own - the role of the technology must be defined by the benefits it is seeking to deliver. However, these are unlikely to be delivered on the day of go-live. Typically, true benefits of CRM are delivered some time after the solution has been embedded within the processes of the business.
Chapter 3:
Continuous improvement and success metrics
25
Once a CRM project is live, a number of forces will influence the direction you take
in extending the scope and capability of your CRM solution. In the current climate,
customer approaches to researching your organisation and offerings as well as
buying, complaining, seeking assistance, recommending, renewing or upgrading are
becoming more and more sophisticated.
The idea of your organisation evolving to fit these purposes is something that should
exist as a business philosophy to start with (as is the case in most operational
businesses), but it should not change the core business case for CRM.
Staying focused on the business benefits of your project will ensure your CRM system
stays mission-focused. However, adhering to the following four investment areas
will mean it evolves in the right way:
c Strengthen customer relationshipsCRM’s fundamental benefit should be to improve and customer communications
within your business. Indeed, according to Forrester Research, the top three reasons
companies implement a new CRM strategy are as follows:
• Standardising decentralised processes that impede customer relationships – to
replace old systems that risk quality, cost and customer experience.
• Enhancing connections with customers via new technologies – to prioritise
human-driven interaction with customers, and move away from dated mass
automation.
• Utilising new channels that offer a path to more personal customer
communications – practicing communications across smart devices, video and
social media to achieve a personal approach.
Strengthen customer
relationships
Extend coverage
Optimise processes
Maintain Data Quality
Metrics and Measurement
26
It is important to ask whether your project has led to your organisation
communicating the right personalised messages to each customer, based on their
profile, preferences, propensity and lifecycle stage. Do your customers get to interact
with your business via their preferred channel, and is the experience consistent?
CRM alone cannot be a panacea for such issues, but how you apply CRM data and
process principles to new channels and offerings, without stifling innovation, will
go a long way to better customer communications and matching the questions above
with positive outcomes.
c Extend coverageIn your phasing process, it is possible to choose one particular department, process
or geography as the ‘low hanging fruit’ for first phase deployment. However, as
part of your continuous improvement programme, it is important to produce a clear
roadmap of how CRM could eventually account for customer data from all aspects of
the business.
Most organisations manage many sources of customer data in multiple silos,
including legacy software applications, Microsoft Excel worksheets, accounting
systems and standalone email marketing tools. Retiring this type of legacy to create
a sole CRM database should be the evolutionary goal, as this will arguably lead to a
single view of the customer.
Some analysts contest that no organisation truly operates with a single view.
Whatever your stance, having single customer view as a continuous improvement
aim will at least help your project to focus on joining data from all areas of the
business more effectively, and this can only improve customer communications in
the future.
c Optimise processesIt clearly makes sense to eradicate inefficiency in business processes by creating
tighter, robust and real-time integration between operational systems as part of the
Research from Experian states that 72% of businesses understand the advantages of having a single customer view, but only
16% have one in place.
27
CRM initiative. But optimising processes effectively is not a short-term operation
due, potentially, to the number of departments involved.
Practical examples include:
• Leads captured from your website are fed directly into the sales team for
progression, using a standard CRM process.
• Integration of CRM transacted sales orders into your accounting system for
invoicing.
• Feeding CRM sales forecast data into the MRP system for production planning
(for a manufacturer) or into the resource planning system (for a consulting firm).
c Maintain data qualityWithout well-executed data quality management, all attempts to join-up your
organisational data with a CRM initiative fall by the wayside.
There are obvious rules of thumb data management must adhere to - high-quality
data should be accurate and consistent, as well as relevant and valid. At the same
time, every database has eroded and misinterpreted records, duplicates and missing
fields, so detecting the record types that create a damaging impact on the company
performance is a must.
Data2CRM’s Natalie Khomyk states there are five key facets of data quality
management that a CRM initiative must abide by:
Industry view“Optimising processes should be something that every organisation considers in
order to stay focused on business benefits.
“A good CRM system should be flexible enough to support changes in process.
Real efficiencies can be gained by making slight changes in business processes,
particularly where these add consistency in behaviour across the business.”
- Jeremy Ward, Head of CRM consulting, Xpedition
28
1. Completeness.
Your entities should have all the records and rows with the information about a
customer or transaction, etc. Make sure that conditions for referential integrity of
different entities are set up.
2. Correctness.
All the attributes of your data should correspond the validity rules.
3. Accuracy.
Records are the foundation of the decision-making process, so they should be
consistent and stored in the corresponding fields.
4. Timeliness.
To ensure the relevance of your data, enter it into the CRM system. The real-time
records have a considerable influence on the reporting and forecasting processes.
5. Availability.
CRM users may have an ability to limit the access to their records, which increases
the appearance of copies. A company database should be accessible for the effective
accomplishment of a daily round.
Data is the beating heart of a CRM system, but users have to be able to trust the
accuracy of information, especially in a company-wide initiative. Building a clear
data management strategy that outlines the data lifecycle, ownership, verification
and refresh principles for master data is the only way of safeguarding against data
erosion.
Industry view“The introduction of obsolete, inaccurate, inconsistent or duplicated data into
CRM when it first gets going is going to fundamentally damage the project and the
perception of CRM. So, clean it up! Don’t underestimate the importance of this task.
“The effective ongoing maintenance of data is imperative to ensure that the power
of CRM is actually available and driving and adding value to the business and its
customers.”
- Jeremy Ward, Head of CRM consulting
29
c Metrics and measurement The final aspect of continuous improvement is one that should be embedded
into your change management psyche from the off – the art of measuring your
deployment’s level of perceived success.
Research from Forrester states that, historically, a lot of CRM initiatives went awry
or were perceived not to be successful because there was really no way to tell if
they were successful or not, with many projects failing to implement metrics to
determine success.
And implementing the wrong metrics is just as bad as having no metrics, as it not
only means that you’ll struggle to monitor and manage performance, but you’ll also
potentially create disaffected staff.
An example of this is if a frontline employee can’t see what their day-to-day tasks
have to do with the measures in place. If, for example, they’re a customer service rep
told to improve first call resolution rate and can’t see where that fits into the bigger
CRM picture.
However, there is no shortage of things to measure in the world of customer
relationship management – and this should be enough to find metrics most relevant
to your project and employees at different levels, in different departments.
The three departments that are most associated with the influence of CRM systems
utilise a whole range of different operational metrics to measure their related
performance. By department, these include:
Gartner research has found that even if the company knows what it is trying to achieve,
there can be an issue if frontline employees are not being measured on the correct metrics more
relevant to their individual jobs.
30
• Number of prospects
• Number of new customers
• Number of retained customers
• Close rate
• Renewal rate
• Number of sales calls made
• Number of sales calls per
opportunity
• Amount of new revenue
• Number of open opportunities
• Sales stage duration
• Sales cycle duration
• Number of proposals given
Possible metrics by department
• Number of campaigns
• Number of campaign responses
• Number of campaign purchases
• Revenue generated by campaign
• Number of new customers
acquired by campaign
• Number of customer referrals
• Number of web page views
• User goal completion rate on web
• Time per website visit
• Customer lifetime value
• Cross-sell ratio
• Up-sell ratio
• Email list growth rate
• Number of cases handled
• Number of cases closed the same
day
• Average time to resolution
• Average number of service calls
per day
• Complaint time to resolution
• Number of customer call backs
• Average service cost per service
interaction
• Percentage compliance with SLAs
• Calls lost before being answered
• Average call handling time
Marketing
Sales
Service
31
In addition to these more traditional operational metrics, recent years have seen
businesses expand their measurements to outside of the business, specifically
incorporating Voice of the Customer feedback measures (such as customer
satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, customer loyalty, likelihood to purchase and
likelihood to recommend) and social media metrics (such as sentiment, influence,
reach and share of voice).
Forrester is quick to specify that it is not feasible to measure all of these aspects.
However, having a firm grasp of your business objectives and expected benefits
means you are likely to be able to focus your attention on the correct number of
selected metrics.
Forrester also states that you establish the current baseline of performance before
you start your CRM initiative and define the increment of improvement that you
want to achieve at a specified time in the future. Monitor these metrics on a regular
basis and take remedial action if you find yourself falling short. Also, link CRM goals,
strategies and metrics. If your business goal is to improve revenue from new sources
by 10%, your strategy might be to increase average deal size by selling more solutions
instead of individual products. The metrics associated with this approach could be
average deal size and average revenue per sales rep.
Industry view“You might have identified that, in one of your customer journeys, your customer
support team cannot easily find any previous interactions and communications with
any given customer.
“One of your problems is then that your customer has to start any dialogue and
explanation of their situation from the beginning again.
“Therefore, you might want CRM to quickly and accurately provide customer
support staff with a list of all previous interactions with a customer. You might then
establish a metric for the initiative which demands that previous interactions with a
customer are presented to a customer support user within 10 seconds of a customer
calling in.”
- Jeremy Ward, Head of CRM consulting
Chapter 4:
Key takeaways
33
The key checklist for any CRM project should be as follows:
• Outline a vision that shows that CRM will put the customer and their experience
at the centre of your strategy.
• Devise a business case for CRM, incorporating business benefits that outline
expected revenue, ROI and productivity improvements.
• Obtain executive buy-in for the project from the very outset, and identify the
‘quick-win’ departments during deployment that are likely to create board-level
promotion of your project.
• Plan out a phased implementation strategy that doesn’t leave you and the
departments involved overwhelmed by the change in process.
• Identify a team of advocates and sponsors who will actively promote your system
through the stages of inception and phasing and beyond, into the continuous
improvement phase.
• Apply change management theory to the initiative both through deployment and
in the continuous improvement stage, ensuring that key potential conflicts are
met head-on and given a chance to shape the future of the initiative.
• Ensure data isn’t allowed to erode confidence by guaranteeing your project
upholds an ongoing data quality management programme.
• Where the source data coming from? What state is it in?
There’s no silver bullet when it comes to implementing a new CRM initiative, however the traditional principles of project management apply, and within every successful deployment there are common methods you should abide by - all of which have been outlined in this guide.
Chapter 4:
Key takeaways
34
• Decide on key metrics early on, and work out how they tie in with measuring your
initial business benefits successfully.
It is also vital to, where possible, engage an expert consultancy firm to help define
and realise your CRM vision and help you break each area down into manageable
objectives. Having a roadmap outlined from the start should also ensure you’re
able to stay agile and react to your market and the customer’s changing needs in the
future.
As Paul Greenberg first alluded to in ‘CRM at the Speed of Light’, CRM as a theory
and practice is ever-evolving, and the most successful CRM initiatives approach
deployment are almost always those that have grasped this fact.
The difference between success and failure can ultimately boil down to how exactly
you plan to continually measure your perceived successes, and how well you convey
to fellow employees the benefits of undertaking a project that never truly ends.
Industry view“CRM initiatives are often best delivered in a set of bite-sized chunks. Try to break
down the project into a set of smaller phases, rather than a single, large phase. Plan
for sufficient time and resource for testing. Lastly, plan to communicate and train –
the most likely cause of CRM failure is cultural resistance to change and new ways of
working.”
- Jeremy Ward, Head of CRM consulting, Xpedition
Xpedition At Xpedition we guide your path to growth, through the implementation of intelligent cloud-based business applications. We help our clients to understand how technology canempower their business in real terms, and we deliver.
Previously known as TouchstoneCRM, we offer so much more than CRM and business software.We deliver real business value through expert consultancy. We're known for our questioningnature and for challenging the status quo.
We succeed when you succeed, inspiring clients with insight led guidance. Our market leadingexpertise and industry knowledge will help your business to reach its goals.
We understand your industry. Our experts are passionate about sharing their knowledge,revitalising client experiences and improving operational efficiency. At Xpedition, we’ll show you the way.
www.xpedition.co.uk
