Putting the customer back in focus

what you choose if you don’t know what you want.

Countless CRM projects have completely missed their mark, and continue to do so.

Organisations decide it’s time to see over the way they deal with their customer and jump straight into software selection. They involve consultancy firms who claim to have built an understanding of  ‘CRM Industry best practice’, and they start configuring right away.

No CRM software can deliver benefit to the organisation or the customer if you do not first very clearly decide what you want.

Do you want the smooth phone/CRM integration for managing customer interactions that Avaya/Siebel Oracle can provide you? Is integration with Outlook and other Microsoft products important for you and do you want an easy setup that Microsoft CRM Dynamics can give you? Are you after quick wins with SalesForce? What is the business case for  your CRM investment? Can you afford on Premise, on Demand, customised or not? What does your  business process in Marketing, Sales, Delivery and Service look like? Where does it work well, where does it not? What will you automate and what will remain manual?

This is just a snippet of the questions you need to have clear, well defined answers to. Doesn’t have to be a thick document, but you need to know. Otherwise, you will find yourself making decisions on the fly.

It’s like building a house with many contractors and making things up as you go along. Your house will become expensive and will not reach its full potential. You will be disappointed when you live in it and all those on the fly decisions will frustrate you.

Don’t let this happen to your organisation or your customer. Do your homework. Avoid what is often called in CRM implementation projects ‘a procedure workaround’.

It’s an expression I despise with gusto, and so you should you. A ‘procedure workaround’ is telling your user and your customer that you screwed up and had no other way of fixing it but to revert back to human steps risking human errors. You will not be able to keep you customer cool.

The key to success lies in your own diligence and determination to understand your business and ensure you automate and integrate everything that is needed.

No matter what anyone tells you, do not give in to procedural workarounds. Once you do, you open the door to an army of them, rendering your CRM architecture very vulnerable to human errors and basically catapulting your 360 degree customer information back to the stone age.

Join the ranks of those who understand this.

Take a stand for quality and delivering on your promise of a state of the art CRM delivering you satisfied customers.

And one final thought.

Once you enable customer self-service (Web, IVR, Shop, Service) you don’t want to have to address all those procedural workarounds, those shortcomings of your CRM architecture, once again.

Obvious though that may seem, I have not yet seen a CRM implementation prepare for customer self-service already in the early stages of the project.

Unbelievable, really as successfully maximising customer control and self service is the ultimate frontier in CRM.