Compulan's “Strategies for CRM Success”

1. Accurately Assess Your CRM Needs
CRM is not right for every company. Begin by clearly defining your business issues and needs, and then determine whether CRM can and should be a part of the solution. CRM strategies that are clearly linked to business objectives have a much greater likelihood of success.

2. Don't View CRM As A Technology Initiative
CRM applications can be a viable component of a CRM strategy, but they are not the whole solution. Leading your CRM efforts with technology solutions is akin to allowing the tail to wag the dog. Understand your business requirements and design the right business processes to support relationship management, and allow technology to play the right role... as an enabler.

3. Understand Customer Requirements
CRM initiatives are intended to drive better relationships with customers. And the relationships that are most important to your company are those that provide the greatest profit potential. To make intelligent decisions about CRM strategy and technology, it is critical that you understand your customer's value, needs, requirements and behaviors. This understanding allows you to build systems and processes based on customer requirements and to allocate your CRM expenditures toward customer segments that are likely to yield the greatest returns.

4. Quantify Expected Returns from CRM
The old adage "You can't manage what you can't measure" remains true today. Part of the reason CRM has failed to prove its worth has been the inability to demonstrate measurable benefits. Don't be satisfied with intuitive CRM benefits alone. Ensure your planned strategies and expenditures are clearly linked to measurable business impacts. And, leverage those measurable results to gain support and momentum for your CRM efforts.

5. Make CRM An Enterprise-Wide Initiative
CRM efforts within an organization are often championed by one functional area, and strategies are pursued in a functional vacuum. This approach fails to consider that almost all business processes involve more than one functional area within the company. The greater the level of integration among all functional areas, the better experience you'll be able to deliver to your customers.

6. Ensure Integration Across All Distribution Channels
Customers today demand the ability to do business through more than one channel of distribution, and they expect a seamless transition between channels. Consumers will never understand why a product bought on-line can't be returned to the local store. These consumer demands require you to track information about customers across all channels and to develop integrated systems, data and processes. That way you're able to project one view of your company to customers, and one view of the customer to all areas/channels within your company.

7. Employees Will Make or Break Your CRM Efforts
The best CRM strategies and applications don't stand a chance of succeeding without employee buy-in. You have the choice between making your employees an ally or dealing with them as an adversary. Leveraging employee input on CRM strategy development and application selection on the front-end will lead to greater buy-in post implementation. Your efforts to ensure employee alignment should also include skill development, awards/incentives, tools to gather and address feedback, and ongoing communication strategies.

8. Be Willing to Change Your Processes
Using new CRM technology to enable ineffective business processes is like putting pearls on swine. You will have spent a lot of money, and still be left with a pig. Invest in designing or redesigning business processes to more efficiently and effectively manage customer relationships.

9. Build the Right CRM Infrastructure
There are a number of critical components to an effective relationship management system including; data warehouses, decision support tools, links to operational systems, front-end applications, and staff to manage implementation and maintenance. Many companies spend considerable sums of money on CRM without achieving the anticipated results because they fail to address all of the basics of a strong CRM infrastructure.

10. Recognize that CRM Is a Change Effort
Enterprise-wide CRM can be all-encompassing, consisting of people, processes and technology. Few companies are recognized for outstanding customer relationship management, as the road to CRM success is a long one. Successful companies view the path to CRM as an evolution and are willing to make mistakes, learn from them, and re-group to get closer to the goal. Treat CRM as a change effort -- gain sponsorship of company leaders, establish success measures, recognize and reward successes, and establish processes to ensure continuous improvement. Allocate dedicated resources toward managing change and maintaining momentum for CRM efforts and you will be much more likely to achieve success.

For more information about this or other success stories, contact Compulan.

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