Top 10 key to CRM success

Top 10 key to CRM success

Steve Mankoff 2002/08/14

Many companies have achieved remarkable results in CRM, but some have not fully achieved the expected goal. They encountered different problems: Cost overflow, integration difficulties, and low user acceptance. Fortunately, if the customer relationship management implementation solution is well designed and correctly executed, these problems can be avoided.

As a leader in the Customer Relationship Management Market, Siebel Systems has participated in more than 3000 customer relationship management implementation projects. During the subsequent analysis and implementation of many customer relationship management projects for years of investigation data, we have accumulated rich experience and summarized some best practices of customer relationship management.

We found that the success of customer relationship management mainly depends on the degree to which the company's organization complies with these best practices: the root cause of failure to comply with good implementation practices for customer relationship management projects. If you have implemented the customer relationship management solution or are about to implement this solution, you can design and deploy the system against the following ten successful elements. Under the guidance of these policies, you can avoid common problems in the implementation of Customer Relationship Management and achieve higher CRM return on investment.

1. Establish measurable business goals.

It is very important that you obtain specific commercial benefits from the customer relationship management project. Although this is obvious, many projects fail because they did not notice this "obvious" success factor.

Strictly and clearly define the results of this solution, and increase the average profit of each sales order? Increase customer retention rate? Reduce the cost required to win customers? How to improve the accuracy of prediction? How many customer responses are reduced? Or is it necessary to increase the sales success rate?

There are many customer relationship management solutions to achieve all of the above goals. Therefore, you must determine the problem to be solved first, and then select the Customer Relationship Management Technology Based on this. Telstra is a pioneer in the Australian communication field and has deployed the Customer Relationship Management Solution to more than 2,100 users. Peter frueh, executive director of the company's non-direct selling channel, said: "There are a lot of things e-commerce applications can do. The key is to identify which application is most important to your enterprise ."

Experienced customers have a series of detailed business requirements when purchasing customer relationship management solutions, such as "Reducing the number of service responses by 25%" rather than general desire requirements, such as "improving customer service ". Only by directing the target to specific areas that require improvement can the solution achieve the maximum effect after deployment.

2. Coordinates business and IT operations.

Although Customer Relationship Management is driven by technology, it is not in the technical category. The goal of Customer Relationship Management is to improve customer-oriented business processes. Technology is just a means to achieve this goal. Each successful implementation begins with the confirmation of this fact, and a corresponding operational structure needs to be created to enhance customer relationship management.

In a successful Customer Relationship Management Project, the design and implementation responsibilities of the system are shared by the company sponsors and technicians. Marriott International has deployed customer relationship management applications to thousands of users. The company insisted that this dual-responsibility approach should be adopted in order to ensure that technical innovation and the company's goals are consistent. As Mike Dalton, senior vice president of host systems at Marriott, said, "for every project, we have both business project managers and system project managers. This ensures that the decisions we make are both feasible from the commercial and technical perspectives ." Therefore, we must coordinate the two before the project starts. Chase Manhattan Bank is a bank that deploys the customer relationship management system to more than 600 of its subsidiaries. Jim Burns is vice president of strategy and technology of the national consumer service group of the bank. He provided convincing suggestions on this key issue. "Priority standards should be established with company users in advance to determine which business requirements will guide system configuration," he said. In this way, we can avoid wasting time on the requirement that we cannot increase profits for the enterprise ." Business and IT operations should be considered in coordination, but business factors should be the real source of motivation.

3. Obtain support from senior management in advance.

As the customer relationship management project is a strategic idea, the senior management must provide strong support. Without the support of the Management Layer-including explaining how the new system supports the company's overall goals, the idea of customer relationship management can only be a gimmick or a flash of fashion. As there is a clear trend in companies around the world, If Customer Relationship Management is an important survival strategy for the company, then all executives below the CEO must pay attention to it.

Rob Baxter is Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Honeywell industrial control, a subsidiary of Honeywell International with a market value of 2. $0.5 billion ). When talking about HIC's recent use of e-commerce solutions to provide online services to more than 4,000 customers in 60 countries and support 3,600 field engineers, Baxter said: "senior management must touch on this issue, and there are only two methods. One is to see unparalleled opportunities, and the other is to be scared to death. However, no matter which method they use, there is no problem as long as they take the e-commerce Road ." Honeywell follows this rule in an institutional manner by providing a vice president in each branch to specifically take charge of E-commerce ideas.

4. Let business goals serve as the source of functional development.

Just as a customer relationship management project needs to be driven by business goals, various configuration decisions must also be based on business goals. If a feature does not directly help the company better serve customers, you may not need it. Mike Dalton of Marriott sets five criteria for his company to evaluate e-commerce solutions, that is, a reasonable solution must be able to increase revenue; 2) Improve customer value; 3) supports process integration; 4) reduces technical costs; 5) improves system performance. Note that each of Dalton's "technical" standards is taken into consideration from a business perspective and all emphasize that for employees directly facing customers, system functions should be able to help them better utilize specific work functions.

In addition, company organizations can also use the customer relationship management technology to expand the scope of functional areas. For example, the Belgian bank Banque Brussels Lambert recently used the customer relationship management technology to allow its Contact Center BBL direct agents to respond both to incoming service calls and to execute outgoing sales calls. "After this change happens, our staff will be able to shift their eyes from quantity to quality," says Catherine debatty, BBL direct manager. We can focus less on how many calls are processed, and focus more on collecting information to improve performance and efficiency ." Here, the use of the Customer Relationship Management Technology has indeed changed the job function, but then again, this change is caused by commercial factors.

5. Use real-time available features to minimize customization requirements.

Too many customization is one of the common reasons for overspending and expiration of customer relationship management. At the beginning, a project team may only adopt the most basic applications, but they soon became the "feature expansion" prisoner, making the products too professional, this is not required by commercial functions. Alternatively, the project team may fall into the trap of customizing the customer relationship management software to reflect the customization of old systems. In these experiments, many implementation schemes were forced to give up halfway. Even if some were lucky enough to succeed, the cost and time cost were terrible. In fact, if you want to avoid imitating the old solution too much and be careful about the customer relationship management solution, select the solutions that can provide real-time available functions to meet the needs of the company's organizations, these common problems can still be solved. Before customizing a customer relationship management application, consider the existing functions of the application. You may find that the vanilla product meets business requirements better than expected, and does not need to spend a lot of money to customize it. In fact, in the implementation of customer relationship management, customization is often the most expensive, time-consuming, and complex component. Therefore, if the selected customer relationship management application meets your requirements immediately, the total cost of ownership will be greatly reduced during the use of the solution.

IBM is currently introducing one of the most extensive and comprehensive Customer Relationship Management Solutions ever. The goal is to ultimately cover over 100,000 of on-site sales staff, call center representatives, marketing staff and business partners. For its customer relationship management solution, software customization is achieved through the "fill in" method. Before launching any IT solution, IBM will run the business scenario for the end users of the solution to determine where the target software is helpful and where there are defects. Then, in order to fill in all the defects, the Manager will decide whether the software must be customized immediately or wait until the next release to solve the problem. "Our goal is to minimize customization requirements," said Gary Burnette, director of IBM customer relationship management architecture ."

6. Use trained and experienced consultants.

Software consultants often dare to claim that they are capable of meeting the company's implementation requirements. To ensure that system integrators can submit customer relationship management projects on time and on a budget basis, they need to find some strictly trained methods not only for application implementation, consultants who have actually deployed those applications. So how can we know that a potential integration partner meets these requirements? The answer is to hire consultants who have been certified by your software provider. For us, it is not enough to emphasize the importance of following this convention.

Jim mcpeak is vice president of envoy, whose headquarters is in Nashville. He confirms that using certified professionals has a great advantage in implementing the company's customer relationship management solution. Jim mcpeak said: "If you are using certified consultants, you will know that you are dealing with people familiar with the software. Compared with other consultants, certified consultants can translate business requirements into software configurations more effectively. In addition, they can make more realistic predictions based on the time and resource requirements required by the customer relationship management project ." Tip: the customer relationship management application is frequently released. Therefore, make sure that your consultants are certified for the latest software release.

7. End users actively participate in solution design.

The principle is simple, but it is often ignored. That is, unless end users are integrated into the system, the system may be implemented, although intended to provide help, however, this situation is confusing the people who want to help. Nexstar Financial Corporation is a national mortgage lending company that provides a full set of services. It provides housing loans to employees and customers of large companies and financial service institutions. Rich harkwell is the company's vice president of customer experience solutions. He has recently successfully deployed a customer relationship management solution. When asked about the experience gained from it, harkwell replied: "It depends on valuable feedback from end users. In this deployment, I mainly rely on feedback from customer service representatives. Once you present the solution's vanilla function to them, they will tell you exactly how to design and improve the product to help improve efficiency ." One experience should be kept in mind, that is, to integrate the ideas of professionals closest to the product into the system design. For example, in the interface design, the goal is to make the user interface more intuitive and user-friendly as much as possible. However, only the users who actually use the software can tell the design department whether the software interface is intuitive.

8. Invest in training to improve the capability of end users.

Adequate training for end users is critical to the success of the Customer Relationship Management Project. The training should be prepared early and should not only focus on how to use the functional features of the software. The trainer also teaches employees how to effectively execute business processes supported by the customer relationship management system.

As customer relationship management implementation solutions often change the company's business processes, end user training should also focus on "Change Management ". Employees need to understand how new processes and customer relationship management technologies help companies better serve customers. If employees know how the system will improve their efficiency in their future work, they will actively adapt to the new environment. However, in order to receive such enthusiasm and support from employees, company organizations must involve end users from the very beginning, in addition, the customer relationship management solution design and related training should involve them.

9. Use the phase deployment plan.

Most Successful Customer relationship management projects use the phase deployment plan. In the phase deployment plan, each phase focuses on a specific customer relationship management goal and must produce a "quick Harvest"-that is, it takes a certain period of time (generally three to four months) to produce meaningful results.

Our customers usually use phase deployment, and in each phase, the target object of the solution is a specific user group. The user group mentioned here may be a department that is being troubled by a certain link, but is likely to benefit quickly from the customer relationship management solution. It may be a department with a high enthusiasm for the new system, departments that are eager to put it into use may be functional areas where the management sees a reason to quickly return on investment; or areas that are most likely to benefit from the out-of-the-box function. Of course, it may also be a combination of the above four types. To quickly benefit, you often need to deploy out-of-the-box non-configuration implementation solutions. For example, Telstra, an Australian Communication provider, started to deploy e-commerce solutions with outgoing calls at the beginning, and used a small number of contact, accounting, and opportunity modules. In just four months, the efficiency of the company's employees has tripled. After dividing a complex project into many "small pieces" that are easy to manage, the company can quickly see the benefits. The step-by-step method also enables project leaders to be motivated by the new system.

Phase deployment also allows you to know the solution situation at any time. With phase deployment, you can test new ideas with low risks, integrate customer feedback into ongoing solution design, and avoid repeated mistakes. Dow Chemical has deployed multi-channel Customer Relationship Management Solutions to more than 2,000 users. During deployment, their slogan is "Big focus, small start, and fast update", which exactly embodies the purpose of E-commerce deployment we mentioned above. Phased deployment does not mean that the deadline is delayed. For a phased-out project, each phase should have its own strict schedule, so that the entire deployment design will not exceed the deadline. During solution deployment, most Phase I projects are completed within one quarter, while the entire multi-phase deployment project is completed within one year. We have even seen some phase I projects completed in a week. It can be said that, if properly managed, no solution should be deployed for six to eight quarters. And the ROI should be visible before that.

10. Measurement, monitoring, and tracking.

Once the customer relationship management system is put into use, the company must measure, monitor and track the efficiency of the system and continuously improve the system performance accordingly.

Corporate organizations must also conduct regular surveys of customers to determine the impact of Customer Relationship Management Solutions on their attitudes and behaviors. Independent Company services should be used when conducting customer surveys. This outsourcing service not only relies on professional skills and industry benchmarks, but also ensures that customer responses are not filtered and the information obtained is more reliable.

Finally, the monitoring results should be reported to all managers and staff who are interested in the customer relationship management system. As Tom Siebel said in his new book taking care of eBusiness, "The report function completes a 'feedback cycle'-this is a basic feature of a continuously learning and progressive company, in this way, the management personnel and staff who are in direct contact with the system can pay close attention to the main measurement results and make corresponding adjustments accordingly. Measure in detail the degree to which the E-commerce system meets customer requirements and match the measurement results with specific operations and procedures. This capability gives the company a solid foundation for its competitive advantage, this foundation is hard for other competitors to imitate." Is customer relationship management complicated in deployment? The answer is quite positive and complicated. Because major companies rely on it to solve complicated business problems. But complexity does not mean failure. On the contrary, as long as the company chooses the appropriate technology and complies with the top ten success factors, it is expected to get a huge return from the customer relationship management investment.

Internet weekly report

Link: http://www.ctiforum.com/technology/CRM/2002/08/crm0827.htm

 

Author profile:

Steve Mankoff

Steve Mankoff has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry and currently serves on the boards of convergeone, nomis solutions, signaldemand, and virtual instruments and advisory boards of C3, cloud9 analytics, kepha partners,
And neuvora.

Previusly, Steve worked as senior vice president global and technical services at Siebel Systems, Inc. which was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2006. steve was a member of the founder's circle of first employees and the Siebel executive management team.

As senior vice president global and technical services, Steve was responsible for Siebel's global expert services, education, professional services, quality engineering, technical account management, technical support, customer satisfaction and offshore development
Programs.

The combined organization had over 2,100 employees, over 700 dedicated contractors and annual revenue approaching $1 billion. prior to Siebel, he held various product, marketing, and sales management positions at several software companies including Oracle.
Steve earned a Master of Science in management from the MIT Sloan School and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Brown University.

Industry Focus

Software & Software Services