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William Band, a CRM analyst for Forrester Research has written a highly useful paper titled "Best Practices for CRM Deployment."
"Forrester talked with 22 large organizations in North America, Europe, and Asia to understand their methods for achieving business performance improvement through investment in CRM initiatives," Band writes. "Organizations spend heavily to improve customer-facing processes, but they still struggle to achieve satisfactory returns on their effort."
Band has identified ten best practices companies use "to address five critical issues: governance, process management, data management, user adoption, and technology." He finds that "as a result, these businesses have captured four types of benefits: increased revenues, lower costs, higher return on investment, and improved competitive strength."
In this second of three parts we'll see examples of what best practices Band's talking about. The whole paper's available at resourcecenter@forrester.com:
Build strong executive sponsorship. The executives Band and his colleagues interviewed emphasized "the importance of having strong and visible commitment by top management for customer-facing initiatives to succeed."
No, there isn't any "single-best way to secure top-level sponsorship," that's where the fun and creativity come in. About the only thing that is for certain is that "if sponsorship
is absent, the risk of failure increases significantly."
And Band finds that the more closely aligned to important business strategies CRM is, "the more likely senior management will see it as important." He gives business case examples of firms facing significant challenges to survival "in the wake of a poor
performance review by industry regulators." This prompted an effort to be more customer-centric, a strategy approved by top executives who then led the charge.
Another essential to successful CRM, Band's research found, is to require that business executives lead CRM, with support from IT. Information technology pros are great, we all need them, they have an important role to play in helping business leaders understand how to take advantage of mature CRM technologies as well as emerging approaches such as CRM software-as-service, but they're not the guys you want making the business decisions.
As Band says, "it's the 'business' parts of the organization that are accountable for delivering profit and loss," therefore "CRM initiatives must be led by business executives who own and manage the customer-facing processes that impact organization success metrics." Again, Band gives useful examples of what he's talking about.
One more essential practice for successful CRM: Define objectives and processes first, and then apply technology. CRM technologies are a means, not an end. Tools, not ends in themselves. If you want to drive a nail, the niftiest screwdriver in the world is useless to you. Define CRM objectives and the business process changes necessary to meet the objectives before considering a technology purchase.
What's your goal, Band asks: "To increase revenue per sales rep? Increase average order size? Decrease customer acquisition costs? Improve customer retention? Decrease service response times?" Different tools for each job, my friend. Make sure you know what the job is before you buy the tools otherwise you'll end up trying to paint your house with that great new best of breed belt sander you bought because it's the hottest technology out there right now.
Much more in the paper, well worth its cost.
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