By Patricia Seybold (original article on
CRM Guru)
Have you done what it takes to aviod or redress eight common CRM/CMR mistakes?
1. Did you design from the inside out?
In other words, did you begin your initiative by focusing on what your marketing execs and your sales execs wanted from the CRM initiative, rather than starting with what your customers needed? If so, the obvious antidote is to immediately find out what it is that your customers want and need to ease their interactions with your firm. Start by asking the folks on the front lines. Then ask your customers.
What will you find? Usually the "low-hanging fruit" that customers demand is visibility into any and all processes they've initiated with your company: they want to be able to see the status of their inquiries, service requests, applications, approvals, purchases, and delivery.
Typically, your customers and prospective customers will also need quick access to pre-sales decision-making information that is presented consistently no matter whom they interact with or what interaction touchpoint they use (Web, catalog, phone, e-mail, face-to-face). They want to be able to get ballpark pricing, answer their own questions about purpose and fit, and decide whether or not they want to consider your firm's products—usually in a single, informative interaction.
2. Did you neglect the necessary corporate culture changes?
It is necessary to make major, transformational changes to our corporate culture, compensation structures, and training as we try to implement a customer-managed relationship strategy. But this is, unfortunately, the area in which most companies don't get it right. It's easy to underestimate the amount of work, time, and attention it takes to make CRM/CMR succeed. If you feel that the organisational transformation that needs to take root hasn't exactly blossomed in your company yet, what can you do about it, particularly if the bloom is already off the proverbial CRM rose due to unmet (and probably unrealistic) expectations?
We recommend that you place a renewed focus on customer metrics. Measure, monitor and continuously improve what matters most to customers. Set realistic goals and achieve them. Amplify these results loudly. Recognize everyone who contributes to these results. Start by monitoring and reporting on two or three goals that matter to customers.
Here are some examples of the type of areas in which you should set CMR metrics to track, monitor, and improve (these will depend, of course on your type of business/industry):
- Improve single-contact problem resolution;
- Provide proactive order status;
- Decrease time-to-quote;
- Enhance quality of decision-making information: Pricing, availability, delivery time and other attributes that matter to customers;
- Shorten time-to-delivery/fulfillment;
- Improve inventory availability for the products that customers care most about;
- Improve access to and accuracy of transaction & interaction history; and
- Improve returns handling and crediting.
As you focus on improving customers' experiences of doing business with you, of course, you'll want to correlate those improvements to customer retention, customer referrals, customer revenues, and customer profitability (as measured grossly by revenues minus costs-to-serve).
Continue to build buy-in at the top of the organisation and across the organisation. You need a "buck stops here" person to be in charge of the quality of the customer experience for each major customer segment you serve. If you have several of these folks, they should work together in a customer experience council to reconcile their customers' priorities.
A good way to gain traction, buy-in, and clout is to continuously bring customers in, have them map out their desired scenarios and involve as many high-level executives as possible in each session. Videotape these customer sessions and use the tapes liberally in company meetings. Tell the customers' stories over and over again!
3. Have you focused on customer acquisition rather than on customer retention?
If so, is that strategy working for you? If not, you may want to reverse your priorities and use your CRM initiatives to focus first on how you can do a better job of retaining the customers you have. Once you are both retaining existing customers and are able to increase the share-of-wallet you have with them, then it's time to go find more customers like the most profitable ones you already have. And, by the way, the best way to do that is through referrals from your existing, loyal customers.
So, what should you be doing? Concentrate on using your CRM initiative to satisfy your existing customers. Set clear goals for improving customer retention, and evaluate each step you take in your CRM efforts against its likelihood to improve customer retention. Then measure how you're doing against those customer retention goals.
Focus your CRM-based marketing efforts on building, sustaining, and deepening your relation-ships with the customers you already have. Don't do this by being in their face constantly with new offers. Do it by acknowledging their business, making them feel special, listening to their suggestions, and letting them know what you're doing to make it easier for them to do business with you. Harley-Davidson is an example of company that does a great job of making its customers feel special. Every Harley customer is proud to be a Harley owner. What can you do that would make your customers feel that much loyalty?
4. Did you start with Sales Force Automation (SFA) or opportunity management?
If so, how is it going? Are your customers getting better, more accurate and more welcome care and feeding from your direct sales force due to the great information these sales folks now have at their fingertips about each customer account? Are your prospects able to make buying decisions more quickly? Are you able to close sales faster? Are your customers being offered the right upgrades and add-ons for their particular situations? Are they responding by buying more from your firm?
If not, re-evaluate your roll-out priorities. We've found that, all-to-often, CRM/SFA implementations have been force-fit into organisations in order to give sales managers visibility into the sales pipeline rather than in order to make it easier for customers to buy. How can you fix an SFA roll-out that isn't gaining traction?
Try focusing on customer service and on application/information integration first. You should never roll out a system to your sales force that hasn't first been used by your customers! In other words, if your customer relationship management system doesn't address the questions and issues that customers or prospects need to have answered, then it's not going to give your salespeople the information they need to do their jobs either.
One tool manufacturer that was driving its CRM implementation using a sales force automation ROI had the foresight to begin its roll-out by integrating its back-end accounting systems into its CRM system. Once every existing customer's account was populated with at least six month's of account history from the order entry and accounting system, that system was used first by the folks on the front lines in customer support and by customers serving themselves via the Web. Only after the customers, themselves, had been able to query their own account information, and the customer support reps knew that this information was accurate, was the SFA application rolled out to the field sales force.
What about new prospects? These were qualified by an in-house telemarketing group and pre-entered into the SFA system. The information the sales team received was accurate and up-to-date. For prospects, the sales call was a seamless follow-up to an inquiry process that was well underway. And the sales per-son was already knowledgeable about their situation and about the information they'd already asked for and received.
5. Did you neglect to streamline the decision-making information that customers need most?
One of the most common pitfalls in CRM implementations is to neglect to provide customers and customer care representatives with accurate, consistent product and support information. Most CRM Executives don't realise that getting content management right is a huge gating factor for any CRM initiative. In fact, the disconnect between the information provided on your Web site(s), over the phone, and in your company's physical outlets may prove to be the biggest impediment to the success of your CRM initiative.
What do customers need most? They usually need purpose and fit information. They also need price and availability. They need to know if this product or service is right for them. They usually have constraints and needs that dictate the kinds of products they find most appropriate. Ideally, customers want to be able to judge the appropriateness of your products for themselves by asking a few basic questions. That means that your product information and the service information about your products needs to be available to customers and to CSRs in a parameter-based way.
The best way to hone your product information is to organize it first for Web self-service customers. Once they can find the products they need and can easily make buying decisions based on the information that's available online, provide that same set of product information and decision-making tools to your customer support and sales people.
6. Did you do a good job of designing your customer database?
We've seen many CRM implementations crippled due to decisions that were made early in the design phase about how customers and their accounts should be organized. This isn't unusual. Often it's not until you begin really using a system, listening to the questions that customers ask, and trying to support them, that you realise you didn't quite capture all the important relationships and subtleties that are needed to really sell and service that customer well.
You should be prepared and even eager to rework the structure and organisation of your customer in-formation systems as you learn more. Don't worry that you didn't get it exactly right at the outset. Do plan to evolve your customer database schema over time.
Typical re-works usually have to do with the relationship of customer records to accounts -- whether these are family/households or companies with departments and subsidiaries. People live and work in complex interrelationships. These change all the time. While there are legal requirements for how you may need to organize some of your customer information -- head of household, procurement officer, CEO, and so on -- there will be lots of roles and relationships you didn't foresee. Inflexible customer information systems and policies that can't be over-ridden get in customers' way when they want to get things done. Yet, if you do these work-arounds as notes in customer records, or by creating new re-cords and relationships that weren't anticipated, you'll be adding warts that will cause you pain in the future.
So, don't assume that you have the "correct" information architecture and representation for your consumer or business accounts. Do assume that you'll need to revisit the structure and organisation of your customer information systems every year or so.
7. Did you postpone the integration of information and business processes across interaction touchpoints and operational applications?
Lots of companies implemented CRM for their sales force and/or CRM for their contact centers, and/or CRM for certain business units without realising how critical information application and integration are to the success of a CRM initiative. Customers don't operate in silos. They interact across multiple touch-points. Their transactions and inquiries touch virtually every back-end system we've ever installed.
The most critical integration points you should be focused on are, of course, the ones that impact your customers the most. On the customer-facing side, that means that your phone support, Web sites and portals, sales force, and technical support or field service organisation must have a seamless integrated and current view of the same customer and status information. Take Lands End, for example. The information and support you receive on their Web site are identical to the information and support you receive over the phone. And, if you complete a transaction online and need to make a change to it, you can call 30 seconds later, talk to a person, and have the change made immediately. That's the level of seamless "front end" integration that customers expect.
However, there's a lot of integration that needs to take place "under the covers" as well. Not only do your Web sites and call centers need to be in synch, so do your operational systems. And the information they contain should be immediately accessible to the customer or to anyone who represents your company to the customer whether he is sitting in the billing department or climbing up a utility pole.
Here's an example of the kind of seamless back-end integration that today's customers expect and deserve. If you live in Brooklyn, NY, and have heating or cooking gas delivered to your home or apartment by Keyspan (formerly Brooklyn Union Gas), the person who comes by to read your gas meter or to check on an installation can also look on her hand-held terminal and tell you whether the company received and credited the most recent payment you made on your bill. She can also contact your property manager for you, consult the building records and tell you who the building's owner is, and check to see whether the service call you scheduled for Saturday is still going to happen in the two-hour window you specified.
If you're in charge of your company's CRM initiative, how do you gain the expanded purview you'll need to stitch together the kind of seamless information visibility that today's customers expect? Start by documenting all the places in which inconsistencies and/or inadequate access to applications and information causes difficulties for customers. Prioritize these in terms of customer impact. Then use that ammunition to lobby tirelessly with all of your colleagues. Eventually, the voice of the customer will prevail.
8. Did you avoid integrating direct and indirect sales and service channels?
One of the largest disconnects we find in most companies that sell or service products through indirect channel partners is a lack of visibility from the customer back through the two (or sometimes more) organisations that sell and service the customer. Channel partners have traditionally demanded a large degree of autonomy from their suppliers when it comes to sharing their customer information. Yet these same partners are usually very demanding when it comes to price breaks, early access to new product information, and support of all kinds from the supplier. The customer revolution is changing these traditional relationships for ever.
Customers now demand and expect to have a seamless relationship with their channel partners and suppliers. Customers don't care about your business relationships and turf struggles. They only care about their needs and wishes. So, if you haven't yet delivered an integrated CRM solution to your channel partners, here are some next steps to consider taking.
First, give your channel partners and their customers transparent access to all of your back-end systems and information. Dealers and their customers both need to see order status and history, current pricing and availability, and detailed decision-making and support information.
Second, dealers need to see what their prospects are doing on your Web site and to receive highly qualified leads that include any relevant information about the products or services in which the customer may have expressed interest.
Third, dealers' prospects and/or customers will expect to be able to contact either party and to get an accurate and consistent update on everything concerning their accounts. They won't want to be bothered figuring out which of you to contact for which kinds of services or information.
In short, design your dealers' CRM systems as if they were yours. Start with the end-customers, design based on what they want and need, and get your dealers involved in the "outside-in" co-design process. Don't charge your dealers for access and use of these tools and systems. Make them available as a value-add that will ensure your mutual success in serving the end-customers.
[Patricia B. Seybold, best-selling author of Customers.com and The Customer Revolution, assesses and predicts how new and evolving technologies will impact customers. Seybold uses an advisory and learn-by-doing consultative approach to help clients transform their corporate cultures to be more customer-centric. She can be reached at pseybold@psgroup.com.]
