Creating Customer Experts

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Whitepaper

Creating Customer Experts

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Executive Summary

The market for customer relationship management (CRM) software has seen strong growth over the last decade, and has long been a multi-billion dollar industry. According to industry estimates, today there are roughly 17-18 million users of packaged CRM software(1)_.

While growth is steady, consider the broader market the software could serve. The fundamental qualifying question for any potential consumer of CRM is a simple one:

Do you have customers?

Doesn’t everyone who has customers want to serve those customers well? Don’t they want to retain those customers? Don’t they want to deliver a great experience to those customers? A great experience every time they (or any of their employees) interact with those customers?

Of course they do. And as an industry, CRM should be helping them do exactly that.

If we think about our industry that way, our perspective on the market potential changes. Consider who we serve. If we look at the labor force in general, about 60 percent of workers in the U.S. (according to us department of labor statistics) are in customer facing roles. That represents about 84 million people of about a 140 million person workforce. That’s just in the United States.

If you look at global statistics, there are almost 4 billion email accounts globally, according to a recent Radacti email usage report. About 918 million of those are corporate accounts; that’s businesses, not individual or consumer. If we conservatively estimate that half of corporate email users are in some form of traditional customer facing role (sales, support or marketing), that tells us that around 450 million people are in customer facing roles globally(2)_.

Think about that:

84 million people in customer facing roles in the United States.

450 million people in customer facing roles globally. Suddenly those earlier market figures – 18 million users – don’t look as strong.

For every person using CRM today, there are 25 other people who face the customer and are not using CRM.

This white paper explores some of the key reasons for this CRM adoption gap, and discusses how the industry can work towards reaching the potential of CRM by focusing on serving its real constituents: the customer and the customer-facing professional.

The result is three pillars as a guide to successful CRM: The customer counts. Treat each customer as an individual by providing users with the information they need when they need to know it.

The user counts. Help each user in their day-to-day job, don’t force them to enter information that doesn’t benefit them, and help them understand what to do next. Every time counts. Treat every customer as important, and make sure every user in the company has the tools and information to make every single customer interaction

Key

3.6 billion email accounts 918 million corporate

accounts

450 million customer facing

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Creating Customer Experts 3

While the CRM market is showing strong growth, the truth is that CRM systems have yet to reach their full potential in terms of widespread user adoption.

CRM Technology Focus

The first challenge is the right focus. CRM has historically often been defined by the needs of the company around the management of the sales team. Many claims of CRM success today still focus on these controls. All too often we see headlines like:

• Better forecast visibility and forecast accuracy, • Consistency and predictability of earnings,

• Better internal controls on sales quoting and contracts, • Comprehensive marketing ROI and accountability CRM software has typically focused on optimizing the point of internal controls. Put simply, the software has focused on the needs of the corporation (both in functionality and technology maturity), vocalizing the CRM business problem as one of management visibility over user productivity.

To be fair, internal controls and sales management reporting are good outcomes. They are solid consequences of well-functioning, high quality CRM processes. However, by focusing on designing for these controls, vendors have sometimes forgotten about the needs of the two most important constituents in CRM: the customer and the customer-facing individual.

How does improved forecasting help a sales person about to have a call with a key prospect? How does better earnings visibility help a customer being transferred through different departments while seeking an answer to an inquiry? The answer is that they don’t. Historically CRM has not focused on the problems that individual users face at the point of engagement with the customer. As a result, CRM has been limited to rigid roles for individual departments, defining data entry processes rather than true sales enablement, and implementing workflows and governance included only for internal stakeholders. Thus, adoption rates among users of these systems have been traditionally low, and “CRM failure” rates cited as high as 50%(3)_.

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CRM Focus: Optimizing the Point of Control

Technology Evolution

But it’s not just the focus – the second challenge to more traditional CRM is that evolution of technology has enabled new ways of doing business. The digital revolution, including the internet, mobile, and social technology, has fundamentally changed buying behavior. Customers today have more choice, more information, and higher expectations. This new type of customer leverages more pricing, consumer ranking, and quality control information than ever before. This customer also is more connected than ever before, networking with peers to share feedback on brands, and wielding more power in influencing other buyers. In the “always on” modern state of business, customers do not care about channels, business hours, departmental silos, or rigid role definitions when it comes to getting their needs met.

To meet the needs of these two key constituents, the user and the customer, today’s CRM systems need to evolve. Customers expect to connect to everyone in your organization, and be understood and identified across multiple channels and departments – the system must support this model. CRM users need to be empowered to help customers at the time they need it – in one-to-one interactions. For example, a recent LivePerson consumer study revealed that more than half of the respondents expect their issue to be resolved by the first person they contact within a company. And since today’s customers do not honor departmental walls – the company needs to deliver a unified voice across every point of contact.

CRM Generational Gap

Adoption Hurdle Traditional CRM Modern CRM

Rigid Channels Client Server Architecture Limited SaaS Options Limited Mobility Flexible Cloud-Based Access the Data/ System Anywhere on Any Device Internal Controls Departmental Silos

Upheld Favors Management Open and Collaborative User-focused; Personalized Experience Data Entry Structured

Manual

Intrusive, Unnatural

Unstructured Data is a Side Effect of Use Seamless User Experience Drives Productivity Rigid Channels Internal Controls Data Entry

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So how do we fulfill the real potential of CRM?

We need to build the CRM experience around the following questions:

1. How can we better understand the needs of each individual customer at the point of engagement? 2. How do we empower our customer-facing users to

engage customers more successfully?

3. How can we deliver a consistent experience every time we interact with customers?

Fundamentally, CRM is about enabling businesses to build deeper and longer term customer relationships – that is, enabling businesses to optimize the point of one-to-one customer engagement. Focusing on the point of one-to-one customer engagement departs significantly from the historic focus on business process, forecasting, and internal management of the sales team. It necessitates that CRM software ultimately addresses the needs of the user who interacts with the customer, the needs of the customer who interacts with the business, and the consistency of that interaction.

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Companies exist to serve customers. Without the customer there is no business.

It has long been known that retaining customers is far preferable to constantly acquiring new ones. Studies show that a five percent increase in customer retention can boost profits up to 90 percent; and the cost of acquiring new customers is five times that of retaining existing ones(4)_{. So}

first and foremost, CRM must enable flawless customer service to drive long-term loyalty and customer growth. This requires that the CRM solution:

Treat each customer as an individual

Customers today are demanding personalized experiences, not generic “offers” that might apply to them based on their demographic. Technology today has taught them to demand an experience tailored specifically to them. Big data technology has deepened the data sets around customer engagements, “humanizing” the process and enriching every interaction point for users.

For example, e-commerce sites like Amazon have collected data around customer purchases – to better understand them as a buyer not a “segment” – and provide recommendations based on their actual behavior, not simply on what items the company wants them to buy. Amazon’s insistence on personalization has resulted in more than 30 percent revenue growth year-over-year for the past decade. Today, customers expect a similar experience across channels, as noted by a recent Accenture survey that revealed three out of four shoppers preferred personalized messages from vendors. CRM needs to adapt to this desire for personalized interactions in both B2B and B2C scenarios, which brings us to our next pillar.

Make all of the customer’s

information available

Second, bring to each user every piece of information they need about the customer or prospect. It’s not just about sales data, or even CRM data. What does a good sales rep do before a call to a customer? They look to social channels for information on the contact and company, as well as researching the history of the customer with the business (CRM data). All of this information (outside and inside the business walls) should be easily available, all in one view, the instant anyone needs to speak with a customer.

This involves a number of data sources, including web logs, online, mobile, application, enterprise transactions, and social media channels. Therefore, users have the most up-to-date information around every customer, regardless of when and how they interact with the customer.

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Deliver the customer’s information when it

matters

A CRM tool can have lots of saved information. However, more data doesn’t always drive more clarity. For CRM purposes, it’s critical to focus on providing customer intelligence with a sharp focus on driving successful one-to-one engagement. This involves not only accessing and surfacing key customer data, but also providing relevant insight to tell the user what really matters to the customer, at the point at which the customer is receptive to the engagement.

For example, a recent survey of women shoppers by mobile shopping platform provider Swirl revealed that 76 percent prefer to shop in stores versus online. However, nearly 60 percent noted they would be highly receptive to relevant, personalized offers based on their preferences delivered to their mobile devices or received from an in-store sales person while they shopped.

It’s the job of the CRM solution to understand what

intelligence is really actionable to your business and relevant to the CRM business outcome, and to enable the business to respond with the right follow-up.

Traditional CRM tools claim to offer integrated account and case management. However the data was often trapped in disparate screen views. Modern CRM systems cue a sales rep, for example, when an upsell prospect has an outstanding trouble ticket – allowing that rep to better prepare or escalate issues before engaging.

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In order for your CRM system to support a great experience for your customers, employees have to actually use the system, and build a rich repository of customer insight and service expertise.

Traditionally, the CRM adoption gap led to forcing users to ‘enter data’ so managers could monitor what sales was doing and understand the position of the forecast relative to earnings projections. Today more than ever, these kinds of ‘big brother’ mandates simply do not work. Data is sparse and the quality is poor. Valuable sales time is exploited. And ultimately customer engagement suffers.

Again, we need to re-think the needs of our constituents and answer the critical question: what motivates the customer-facing user to use the application and generate rich data for the business to ultimately build better customer relationships? In every design the customer-facing user has to come first.

This not only entails that we focus on leveraging user experience paradigms with which the user is familiar and a seamless cross-device experience. It also entails that we ensure the user has the key information they need to be successful, again, when engaging one-to-one with the customer.

Help users do their job: the data is

a side effect

Moving beyond “data entry,” today’s CRM solutions must infuse the user experience with tools and information that help users do their job. The system should build insight based on more frequent usage, rewarding usage and frequency patterns with increased system expertise. For example, frequent usage by employees who engage the customer allows a smart CRM system to “learn” about relationships, and how constituents factor into successful outcomes. By capturing the relationship between people and processes in a more profound manner, CRM technology needs to provide insights around prospects and opportunities

that goes beyond basic account data. In a collaborative CRM environment, a sales rep can be assigned new opportunity, and based on the intelligence housed in the system around the company, the rep and his network - immediately be alerted to both actual and potential internal and external influencers who can help move the deal along.

By logical necessity, as users leverage the system more, managers will also build more accurate, high-quality intelligence about what their teams are doing and who is really driving critical customer successes. The added benefit of this is that, instead of blindly mandating forecast updates, managers can begin to learn optimal behaviors that drive the top customer-facing users and leverage that insight for coaching opportunities to drive more customer successes.

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Give something back: always give

more than you take

For each action you ask the user to take, always give back more than you take. A CRM system should be a tool for the user to enhance their job performance – not an administrative chore that reduces the amount of time professionals have to do what they do best – work with customers.

For example, for a quarterly number that a sales user forecasts, tell that user which deal they should focus on first to optimize their compensation; identify neglected deals based on the cadence of calls across the sales team for new deals; provide warnings about forecasting a deal that is unlikely to close in the current period. In short, provide value to the rep for placing a deal in his or her forecast.

Help users decide what to do next

At each point in the CRM solution, the user should be assisted in what to do next. For example, when working a given opportunity, what similar deals could be leveraged to understand the right call script, presentations, and offers? Who is the proven expert in selling this solution to this industry, in this geography? What is the optimal number of times to make contact this week, and how? It is not enough to simply capture and render data; the CRM system must provide actionable intelligence for each user at every turn.

User-first CRM designs do just that – consider the user’s needs at every turn of the system. Tools like inline editing boost productivity, dynamic and configurable intelligence panels equip knowledge workers with deep customer insights, and intelligent tools like SugarCRM’s unique quota calculation tools give back more to the user than the system takes.

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Every interaction between the customer and user counts.

Every customer, no matter their perceived value to the company, has connections, peers, a voice. Every interaction that is less than stellar runs the risk of being amplified in the age of social media. In fact, news of bad customer service reaches twice as many ears as customers’ praise for a differentiated experience(5)_.

The simple fact is that every interaction has the potential to be amplified beyond your control.

How can you reduce the risk of a bad experience “going viral?”

Every customer is important

Today, every customer is important. There are no unimportant customers. Social media amplifies any positive (or negative) experience. Even very small customers can have a large voice. The simple fact is that every interaction has the potential to be amplified beyond your control. Examples abound, one only needs to search terms like “United Breaks Guitars” or “customer service fail” to see myriad instances of a single negative experience going viral via social channels.

Every user needs to be a customer expert

Second, every user needs to be a customer expert. Internet and social technologies are enabling customers to reach anyone inside a company. Anyone may need to interact with a customer. We need today’s CRM system to enable every person in the company with the personalized view of the customer they require to effectively engage the customer. This requires a much more flexible notion of how a ‘user’ is defined. It’s not just users who convert leads or load lists into the system. CRM needs to enable the reference manager, operations, renewals, pricing, executives – we all support the customer, and we all have to be empowered to help the customer. Which brings to me my next point:

Every connection counts

Every connection, every call, every meeting, email, and tweet matters. We need to enable a consistent and seamless experience for every customer, with every user, every time. Every customer should feel like they are talking with the same user every time. For example, what if you could speak to multiple departments, and each one picked up the dialogue with you seamlessly each time… what if they collaborated through a single platform embedded in the context of the customer?

III: Every Time

In today’s increasingly crowded marketplace, delivering consistent solid customer experiences is a way to differentiate and thrive over your competition. With SugarCRM, embedded and context-rich Activity Streams foster collaboration inside and between teams, insuring that any user can access the right information or expertise on any device when it matters most.

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Conclusion

Every business has customers. CRM solutions need to help every employee create a better experience for every one of their customers.

When every customer, every user and every interaction counts towards reaching your business goals - one thing becomes clear. Organizations

looking to provide the best experiences need a single, unified CRM platform to bring every internal and external associate on to the same page.

A CRM system meeting these business needs must have certain technical aspects to support these requirements. For example, in order to offer users a single unified experience – that CRM offering should be built on a single platform, not on multiple SaaS and premise-based tools cobbled together via years of mergers and acquisitions. However, that platform must offer the flexibility to run in any operating environment: public cloud, private cloud or on-premise.

And, as a single unified platform, that offering can then provide a common and collaborative user interface. This shortens deployment learning curves, driving higher adoption levels and ROI. And this level of innovation should not stop at the user experience. In addition, a modern single CRM means that additional features provided by third parties should truly be seamless; not forcing additional logins or user learning curves. Only open platforms can support this type of deeply interconnected processes, aimed at enhancing every user interaction.

With the right product, offered at an affordable price point, entire employee populations – not simply a few departmental users – can take advantage of the benefits. With a system that focuses on every customer, every user, at every interaction, organizations can start insuring every customer interaction will be a positive contribution to the overall brand experience.

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM helps make every user more effective every time they engage one-on-one with a customer. SugarCRM SugarCRM’s market-leading open Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform delivers the agility, flexibility, and security required to equip each customer facing professional with the information and tools they need to know their customers better, do their job better, and deliver a consistent, superior customer experience across the organization,every time. SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than 12 million times and currently help over 1.2M end users across disciplines effectively engage their customers. Over 6,500 organizations have chosen SugarCRM’s On-Site and Cloud Computing services over proprietary alternatives. SugarCRM has been recognized for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld and Customer Interaction Solutions.

To begin a free trial of SugarCRM, and see how your organization can make every customer count, delight every user, and provide consistent experiences every time – visit www.SugarCRM.com/Free_Trial

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Resources

1. Gartner; IDC Research 2. U.S. Census Data

3. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/projectfailures/crm-failure-rates-2001-2009/4967

4. Gartner Research: Leading on the Edge of Chaos”, Emmett C. Murphy and Mark A. Murphy

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Creating Customer Experts

Whitepaper