May 2002 Newsletter

Introduction

Processes are vital for CRM success... Balanced Scorecard provides good mechanism for CRM measurement and more information on our Breakfast Workshops.

The aim of this communication is to bring you informative articles, tips and news on how to successfully merge teams and technology and maximise your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

This months topic: CRM and Process

If organisations want a maximum return from CRM then the processes it introduces need to become the cornerstone of the culture of an organisation. How many though, do not reach a good level of return because processes are not made mandatory? As Jim Dickie puts it, "Account Managers tend to view themselves as CEO's of their own territory, unbound by a structured methodology for working with customers."

In our experience, one of the major contributing factors to whether organisations maximise their return on the CRM technology depends on how process orientated they are prior to implementation and how committed they are to making CRM process a non-negotiable necessity after implementation. For more, read Jim Dickie's article on the web Great CRM Hinges on Great Business Processes.

Last month we mentioned that we were looking at ways of measuring ROI (return on investment) and driving more effective CRM through implementing Balanced Scorecard type performance management. The biggest challenges most people face in implementing CRM are not the technology ones but rather the changes to business processes and behaviour. In order to keep these initiatives on track, many companies are implementing measures and reporting to view their progress. This article - Keeping the CRM Score** - by Emma Warrillow will provide you with some more information and examples of how the Balanced Scorecard is helping some organisations and their CRM initiatives.

** note: - you will need to subscribe to 1to1.com, then do a search for "Keeping the CRM score" in the site search box.

Upcoming Events

Our breakfast workshops will begin in June, with the first being held in Auckland. We anticipate sending out the short 'topic survey' next week. The survey will be brief and will take only a few minutes to complete. We will provide a review of the feedback to all respondents and those that do respond will go into a draw for an excellent bottle of New Zealand Chardonnay. The winner will be announced in next month's eZine. We will be sending it out to all our eZine readers, so if you do not wish to receive it, please reply to this eZine by typing 'No Survey' in the subject header.

Our Australian friends can expect a similar workshop soon thereafter, we are discussing the program with a partner next week in Sydney.

Neil is also doing a tour of both Australia and New Zealand over the next couple of weeks to catch up with many of you to see how your CRM initiatives are progressing. If anyone who has not yet been contacted with regards to a 'catch up' and they would like to, please contact   

Collecting Email Addresses

"More than 500 million people in the world have Internet Access and email remains the most popular application", says Nielsen//Net Ratings. "Of all the popular Internet applications, email is the global activity of choice," said Peter Steyn, director of the research firm. "We found that an impressive 90 percent of the adults in three major markets - Australia, the UK and the Netherlands - used email over the past six months, though the percentages were high for all 12 countries."

However, organisations need a simple, yet cost effective way of being able to obtain the email addresses of their customers and update their customer databases. Organisations need to be able to implement a scaleable activity that will allow them, in a very short amount of time, to obtain large volumes of customer email addresses.

If you would like to find out more about how this can be done, please contact  and we will forward you some more information.

Tips/Thoughts

'Change' - The Oxford Dictionary defines it as "the ideas, customs and art of a particular society". For an organisation it could therefore be "the ideas, customs and ways of doing things in the organisation". When CRM is introduced, or exists, it means - "there will be new ideas, new customs and new ways of doing things". Ignore change management at your peril!!

Remember, although we have a great deal of experience in the CRM arena we do not profess to know all there is. However what we do not know, and what you would like to know, we will research and try to provide relevant information for your benefit. Please email us your questions and comments at  as we're keen to hear from you.

Links to other relevant industry web sites:

www.crm4sme.com - resource site for CRM
www.crmguru.com - resource site for CRM

That's all for this month!

Regards,

The Team at SRD Group.