CRM Know How In Practice
Applying a continuous improvement approach
In this guide
02
Introduction: Why CRM?
It’s simply good business sense
02
CRM best practice based on our hands-on experience.
A CRM model refined and developed
through years of varied engagements.
03
Why CRM projects fail.
How good are your chances of success?
04
The continuous improvement journey.
Deployment and iterative feedback
04
Constraints and influences.
The forces acting on your continuous improvement programme
05
Stay focused on business benefits.
Tactics to support your overarching goals
07
Continuous improvement framework.
Guiding principles and practical tips as you’re
gathering information and building the document
08
Conclusion
CRM Know How In Practice
Introduction: Why CRM?
Understanding your customers - and their needs and expectations - is the key to delivering great service, attracting and creating loyal, repeat customers, and being able to grow your business with them. If you agree with that statement, you’ve grasped the essence of CRM.
It’s not rocket science, it’s just common sense. Your organisation possesses plenty of information about customers and prospects. Your financial and order systems hold data about what they buy and how much they spend. Your employees know how the customers they come into contact with like to engage and do business. Through market research and industry intelligence, you keep up with trends and developments in your marketplace. But how do you bring all of that together, continuously adding to it, and making it available to everyone who engages with that customer? How do you derive competitive edge from rich insights, using them to identify opportunities and risks and to anticipate what your customers will need next?
As businesses and individuals, customers choose to engage, communicate and inform themselves through many different media. With the continuing rise of Web 2.0 channels, you need to capture customer insight and offer your customers convenient and user-friendly ways to engage with your organisation. CRM technology and processes allow you to incorporate new media and dynamic communication into your everyday business activities and develop correspondingly deeper, multi-dimensional relationships with your customers, prospects and stakeholders.
A CRM programme puts in place common methods of doing business and instils a culture of sharing information and collaborating across departments, functions, staff and managers. You’ll capture and share information reliably and comprehensively. You’ll be able to work with that information easily to support decision-making and to prioritise investment of time and resources. You’ll be able to identify new business opportunities and act on them quickly and efficiently, bringing goods and services to your customers at the moment they need them.
If your employees have the right information to hand when any interaction with a customer takes place, they can respond appropriately and efficiently to the particular needs of that customer. Customer satisfaction will be high: you’ll create a virtuous circle of loyal customers who evangelise on your behalf. Everyone in your organisation can play their part in adding to your collective knowledge and making use of it to deliver outstanding service. That’s what CRM can achieve for you.
CRM best practice based on our hands-on experience
This Best Practice Guide is the last in a five-part series. It describes the last step of our proven, five-step CRM optimisation model the TouchstoneCRM Success Cycle. We’ve developed and refined this over hundreds of engagements where we’ve introduced CRM from scratch or stepped in to recover or improve existing and unsatisfactory CRM programmes. We’ve observed the characteristics of projects that achieved their full potential, fell some way short or failed outright.
The TouchstoneCRM Success Cycle is technology agnostic. It works whether you prefer cloud-based or on-premises CRM. It applies equally well to projects supporting B2B or B2C organisations, to commercial organisations and not-for-profits. It’s a best practice approach that supports engagements driven by a range of business objectives, including:
Increasing sales
Increasing customer loyalty and stakeholder engagement Introducing a social media engagement model
Supporting 1-2-1 marketing Decreasing the cost to serve
or a combination of these and other business-specific outcomes.
Why CRM projects fail
Too often, well-conceived and well-resourced CRM projects deliver a technology platform and a set of processes that fall into disuse or disrepair in as little as 18 months.
We also frequently observe well-executed CRM projects that were delivered on time and on budget, after rigorously selecting appropriate technology, and deploying top-notch project management techniques and people, and training end users thoroughly. And yet they have not delivered the tangible results stated in the originating business case. Although CRM has been a mature software category and business strategy for almost two decades, this does not mean that project success is a foregone conclusion. In fact, the chances of your CRM initiative delivering significant value to your business are still statistically small, according to analyst research (including Forrester Research’s 2009 report, which cites a success rate of under 50%.) Our experience in recent years shows us that CRM projects fall into three categories, as represented in this bell curve:
Abandoned Completed Delivering value
Value Delivered to the Business Number of
Projects
TouchstoneCRM Success Cycle ©
Projects abandoned mid-flight are increasingly rare. This is because the maturity of the market means that CRM technology is more robust and its potential is far better understood. Projects don’t tend to fall at the first hurdle because expectations are set better than in the early days of CRM.
As the bell curve suggests, the majority of the CRM projects are completed, in the sense that modern CRM technology was deployed in the cloud or on-premises, the application was customised, data was cleansed and loaded, people were trained and the system went live. These projects were probably delivered on time and on budget. So they didn’t thoroughly fail, but they didn’t deliver any tangible benefits either.
We identify two primary reasons why projects don’t succeed:
A lack of alignment to the over-arching business strategy during the project inception and transition phases Failure to build a continuous improvement model into the CRM strategy.
The continuous improvement journey
Your organisation must consider CRM as a journey, not merely a destination. When the system goes live, it is a milestone along the way rather than crossing the finish line. To ensure your organisation takes advantage of its investments and delivers true business value from its CRM asset, you need to build a continuous improvement model into the overall programme and approach.
Your original business case justifying the project laid out a set of benefits such as efficiency, competitiveness, customer loyalty, cost to serve, and speed to market. To realise these, you need to manage the deployment and execute customer management strategies effectively, measuring the results and feeding the findings back so you can improve all the time. You need to be able to adapt to changing market conditions and embrace new techniques and technologies along with – and ahead of - your customers and competitors.
We recommend a continuous improvement programme that consists of a series of progressive, iterative steps within a robust framework that you can apply consistently to all areas of your deployment.
Constraints and influences
Once your CRM project is live, a number of forces will influence the direction you take in extending the scope and capability of your CRM solution.
CRM roadmap
There will be previously scoped future phases that formed part of your original CRM vision, roadmap and business case. For example, a rollout to other departments or geographies; incorporating systems containing silos of customer data.
External forces
Markets change and competitors never stand still. Your organisation should constantly be evolving to meet new opportunities and threats.
Customer expectations
Customers’ changing expectations of how they want to engage with your organisation will influence your continuing progress. In this faster, flatter global economy, customer approaches to researching your organisation and offerings as well as buying, complaining, seeking assistance, recommending, renewing or upgrading become ever more sophisticated.
Innovation
All competitive and customer-centric organisations are inherently changeable and innovative. They recruit new people with fresh ideas, restructure teams, develop new offerings and refine channels to market in search of incremental improvements. There’s a two-fold challenge here:
How do you quickly take advantage of fresh thinking from new people?
How do you consistently apply your expensively established CRM data and process principles to your new channels and offerings, without stifling innovation?
Stay focused on business benefits
We identify four logical and connected investment areas that organisations should consider in respect of their continuous improvement programme.
Strengthen customer relationships
We consider the following to be key questions you should ask, constantly:
Are you communicating the right personalised messages to each customer, based on their profile, preferences, propensity and lifecycle stage?
Can your customers interact with your organisation using their choice of medium and channel?
Is the customer experience consistent across all channels?
Can all your employees see all customer interactions, and are they empowered by systems and training to deliver on customer expectations?
Can you measure trends in customer engagement and satisfaction?
Do you have appropriate escalation and monitoring processes?
Extend coverage
CRM programmes often begin life as customer service or sales and marketing initiatives. You only realise the true benefits when every aspect of your interaction with customers is captured, achieving a 360-degree view. For example, data associated with service delivery and purchasing are fed back seamlessly to marketing, where the information influences future segmentation and campaign targeting.
Most organisations manage many sources of customer data in multiple silos, including legacy software applications, Microsoft Excel worksheets, Microsoft Outlook contacts, accounting systems and standalone email marketing tools. No single customer view exists and it’s not possible to measure the level of engagement consistently.
Strengthen customer relationships
Extend
coverage processesOptimise employee Increase productivity
In a joined-up CRM strategy, you would retire each legacy application after transitioning the data and function into a single corporate CRM database. In this way, you can optimise customer-facing processes and rely on your data quality. We strongly emphasise this phased deployment approach, proving processes and CRM approach in a controlled environment before rolling out more broadly. In this way, it’s a natural extension to roll out coverage of a proven model into additional customer-facing teams in new geographies and divisions. This quickly enables your organisation to realise extra value from its investment.
Optimise processes
It’s always tough to optimise processes, when fulfilling a customer request or purchase means engagement with several departments. Often a distinct transaction is needed to move between different systems, sometimes by manual rekeying or a failure-prone import process. This introduces errors and latency into the processing.
It clearly makes sense to systematically eradicate inefficiency in business processes by creating tighter, robust and real-time integration between operational systems, as part of your continuous CRM improvement programme. Practical examples are:
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)
Increase employee productivity
How can you continually support your people with data, process and technology to drive a greater impact in their role? CRM continuous improvement can facilitate this, from generating more sales leads from campaigns, closing more sales or positively influencing customer engagement and satisfaction. The business benefits are potentially enormous if you constantly identify new ways to exploit your CRM investment to empower your staff to be more efficient, productive and accurate in decision-making.
Some developments you could apply as part of your continuous improvement programme are:
Provide real-time data from third-party providers within your CRM application to offer new customer insight. You could source new hire information, industry news, social media content and contracts and financial information alongside your corporate CRM data for customers
Optimise your role-based CRM to give your customer-facing users the information they need to respond even faster to inbound requests and create guided processes that deliver a consistent outcome
Drive more intelligence out of your CRM by: suggesting the next action in a sales campaign relative to the characteristics of the deal and past history; identifying hot prospects for products and services based on propensity; directing customer services issues to the most skilled and available resource
Enable team collaboration within the CRM application for shared insight into customers, bids or service cases using micro blogging and social media constructs
Allow people to work flexibly, so the data and processes they need are available on a device of their choosing inside and outside the office
Continuous improvement framework
We propose this best practice operational model for your internal organisation once your CRM programme is live.
Project steering committee
We recommend retaining this team, fully engaged and intact, beyond rollout. Organisations that see the most value from CRM keep the momentum going with a continued high-level focus across every functional area.
The project steering committee should represent the needs of respective departmental teams, validate alignment to business strategy, prioritise, take tough decisions based on progress measurement and above all champion the CRM cause.
Executive sponsor
The executive sponsor fulfils a crucial advocacy role in securing and protecting budget and pushing through resistance. Your continuous improvement programme will entail business change and associated cost, so you still need this level of influence.
Induction programme
You’ll inevitably experience a level of staff turnover and may need to recruit as your business expands. You must therefore build CRM training content into your employee induction programme, to maintain standards of competence, confidence and understanding of CRM in context of the business strategy.
Test, measure, improve
The flexible nature of CRM technology allows you to develop and deploy business processes and marketing communications quickly and cheaply. You have the opportunity to establish a new approach, then measure its impact, learn and improve, using Marketing 2.0 real-time campaign feedback. For example, you can analyse results quickly and relate sales back to their source campaign and activity to find out:
The marketing cost per sale, per qualified opportunity and per lead Your campaign performance in terms of number of leads and ROI achieved
Activity or channel-level performance in terms of number of leads and ROI achieved
Lessons learned
Understanding what worked well and what didn’t in the previous phase is a prerequisite to embarking upon the next. This learning will relate to ‘soft’ elements (user adoption and change management) as much as to the technical aspects.
Project Steering Committee
Executive
Sponsor ProgrammeInduction
Test, Measure,
Improve Lesson Learned Data Quality
Business Strategy Alignment
Data quality
Data is the lifeblood of your CRM system. Sustained user adoption relies on continuing trust in its accuracy. Once this trust is lost, users stop being committed to maintaining that data. This is a vicious circle, which quickly leads to data erosion. We recommend that you build a clear, ongoing data management strategy, laying out the data lifecycle, ownership, verification and refresh principles for master data.
Business strategy alignment
A number of fast-moving trends are emerging in CRM, including social media and ‘gamification’ (applying computer game-design thinking and mechanics to non-game applications). These are exciting developments that could revolutionise your customer relationships, but you still need to maintain the basic principles of business management in adopting or trialling them. Centre your continuous improvement programme on sound governance principles, so that you:
Collect requirements for development and innovation from across the business Prioritise based on ROI and time to value
Verify that the development aligns closely with your business strategy
Deliver value back to the business with new functions in frequent, bite-sized updates Support updates with training and change management plans
Conclusion
The better your organisation understands its customers and their needs and their expectations, the greater opportunity it has to satisfy those needs – that’s the essence of CRM.
Implementing common methods of doing business and instilling a culture of sharing information and collaborating throughout your organisations helps you build valuable collective knowledge about your customers.
Rolling out your CRM programme is just the beginning of the journey. Your customers and business environment are constantly changing, so your CRM programme must evolve with them, offering new insights that drive growth and change as well as responding to internal and external factors. You can build on your core CRM and business processes and principles, adopting the latest and most engaging Web 2.0 techniques and social media strategies to collect and share ever more useful information and build loyalty across customer segments.
Change and evolution are a constant in your marketplace, so you need to be ready to embrace and manage your response to them. CRM initiatives are not static: even the best-planned can fall short of their aspirations if they aren’t equipped to adapt to changing market conditions and business imperatives. It’s vital to embark on your project with a continuous improvement programme mapped out. This will help manage expectations in terms of the time required to deliver organisation-wide benefits, to optimise the effectiveness of your CRM platform and to embrace new opportunities. Working with a trusted CRM consultant means you can be confident that you have a continuous improvement programme that will continue to maximise benefit from your CRM investment at a business level. At Touchstone, we have the experience and expertise to help you put in place a sustainable framework for business growth, evolving along with your strategic, customer and user needs.
The Touchstone approach
People, Partnership and Solutions are the building blocks of successful TouchstoneCRM programmes.
People
Every CRM journey begins with people – yours and ours coming together to agree objectives, standards and methodologies. We’ll develop a partnership and work together to deliver the successful outcomes you seek. Our consultants bring a transformative combination of innovation, skills and enthusiasm to every project. They are all seasoned CRM specialists with deep sector knowledge and a firm grasp of business objectives and priorities. They take personal responsibility for exceeding your expectations. We don’t just put our customers first – we put you way ahead.
Partnership
We don’t just work with you: we truly work together. You can treat us as an extension of your team. We’re always on hand and deeply engaged with your CRM vision. We also partner with our IT suppliers so we always have the latest knowledge about the platforms we recommend. We keep things simple and effective by using best-in-class platforms that we’ve chosen because we know they support business growth effectively. With our unrivalled expertise in these platforms, we can identify the best application for your business. Collaborative, supportive and consultative, we are success-led, not sales-led. That’s why we enjoy so many long-lasting, mutually rewarding client relationships.
Solutions
Our core strength is in the way we use our experience to understand your business and your objectives. Software is simply a tool to help you get where you want to be. ‘One size fits all’ doesn’t work for us. We deliver personalised solutions that fit your organisation’s specific needs. We understand that your business is constantly evolving and customer requirements are changing, so we equip you with solutions that grow with you. Whether you need support with an initiative you’ve started, help to augment or recover an existing project, or a brand new CRM programme, we have the business understanding, energy, ability, resources and enthusiasm to deliver beyond your expectations.
www.touchstonecrm.co.uk [email protected] TouchstoneCRM Limited 1 Triton Square London
