Avoiding The Most Common CRM Pitfalls
BY ED SCHREYER, PEOPLESOFT, INC.
CRM is the meeting point of expectation and experience. All customers
approach your enterprise with a need and an expectation. The interaction
that follows will create an experience that shapes their behavior,
influences their lifetime value to your business and builds or destroys
your competitive advantage. The ultimate promise of CRM is that it will
enable your entire business to optimize around the process leading from
prospect to profit. At every touchpoint with the enterprise, via every
channel and device, all people who are able to shape customer experiences
will be informed, empowered and motivated to help ensure that each and
every interaction results in an experience that exceeds the initial
expectation. Further, the efforts of the enterprise will be strategically
applied, ensuring that the maximum effort is aligned with the most valued
customer. By consistent and continual practice of good CRM, the business
grows its top line revenue while reducing its costs; continually attracts
new customers to its loyal and unassailable installed base, building
sustainable competitive advantage and differentiation.
This promise forms the basis for the expectations that surround the
adoption of CRM products and solutions. It is the justification that
accounts for the "leap of faith" made by business managers who
intuitively know and feel that the sound business practices CRM promises
are the goal worth almost any price. Good CRM is a need borne out of the
increasing challenges business face in the new economy. Global competition
is a mouse click away -- competitors who don't have to make a profit until
after they've hijacked your customer base; product cycles and technology
improvements that shorten the lifespan of any better/faster/cheaper
advantage. New business models like marketplaces that aggregate supply and
demand, allowing small competitors to leverage economies once reserved for
the big -- all are driving the critical need for businesses to leverage
good CRM.
Align Business Expectations With Organizational Dynamics
The first and most fundamental pitfall of CRM is the failure to transform
expectations of its own value into positive experiences. A company seeks
to accelerate its revenue growth by adopting the best sales force
automation (SFA) package they can find. Months later, managers struggle to
prove that they are realizing the expected benefit. Published statistics
tell a dismal story of failed implementations within the SFA space,
consistently hovering between 60 to 80 percent. These statistics have not
changed dramatically over the last 15 years despite an abundance of new
features and additional technological capabilities. The primary reason for
this is that at its core, traditional SFA is about giving salespeople a
tool to capture everything they are doing with their territory and
customers, enabling their managers to judge their performance.
This example of misaligned business expectations and organizational
dynamics is revealing, and not isolated by any means to SFA packages. In
many cases, the business goals are at odds with the individual incentives,
causing the program to produce results that disappoint. For example, a
call center automation package may help process a higher volume of calls,
replete with statistical tracking of metrics such as the time it takes to
complete a call. Individuals in the call center may be motivated, or
evaluated on how quickly they can "process" a call -- in other
words, how quickly they can get rid of the customer on the other end of
the line. This may drive a reduction in talk times, but it also may
sabotage the business goal of providing "better customer
service."
Make CRM An Enterprisewide Mission
Good CRM is a fundamental business practice that ensures every
customer expectation results in an exceptional experience throughout the
enterprise. This type of basic business strategy must be acknowledged,
endorsed and cultivated by the senior management of the organization. It
involves all aspects of the enterprise, and aligns the enterprise with the
overall goals of the program. A growing number of companies, for example,
are basing incentives for the entire workforce on customer satisfaction
metrics. When everybody's bonus is riding on how happy customers are, good
CRM becomes an enterprisewide mission, not a front-office application.
This is very evident when you consider the early CRM implementations.
These products evolved from the workforce automation era, and applied
information processing to customer-interfacing functions such as
marketing, sales or service. Predictably, there were cost-efficiencies
gained within the department, and the ability to share customer
information across the department's personnel made it easier to provide
consistent information to customers. However, the individual department
rarely supported the entire business process related to the customer
expectation. Upon reaching the departmental boundary, the process reverted
back to the disconnected, "fire and forget" method of dealing
with issues.
Avoiding The "Deer In The Headlights" Syndrome
As CRM suites evolved, they were able to link information and workflow
across the "front-office" functions of marketing, sales and
service. This is the typical offering of today's leading CRM providers. It
represents an improvement over the isolated departments, but in reality,
the "islands of automation" have simply merged into a bigger
island within the enterprise. This front-office suite is still unable to
handle basic customer expectations such as, "About the order I placed
the day before yesterday...I'd like to change it from eight green ones to
six, and from seven red ones to fifteen. Can you make the change and bill
it to my credit card?" In a great many instances, the call center
agent trying to field this request will feel like the proverbial deer in
the headlights. He or she can find the original order, but will have no
idea of where it is in the fulfillment process. Has it been picked and
packed? If it hasn't yet shipped, can the change be made? Does the company
even have eight additional red ones in stock? At what stage is the billing
process, and how can the bill be intercepted and changed? This can be a
looming disaster that results in the customer seeing his or her ostensibly
simple request blossom into a fur ball of botched shipments, erroneous
billing and wasted time as he or she plays phone tag with a variety of
different individuals and departments. The result -- another frustrated
customer decides they'll see how business feels with your competitor.
For CRM programs to be truly effective, they must be able to support
all the business processes that shape a customer's experience. This
involves the entire enterprise, and is the obvious reason that operational
CRM must integrate with other functions in your company. How this happens
will depend on the vendor's familiarity with the overall enterprise
processes and systems, how "integration-friendly" their system
is, and their willingness to work with products they didn't sell you. This
need for integration is the basis for a happy and productive consulting
workforce. Some vendors are taking the approach of the
"one-stop-shop," which alleviates the burden of integration; the
tradeoff is that you can't pick and choose from among vendors. Other
vendors are building to an open standards framework in an attempt to
simplify the integration process.
When Benefits Become Liabilities
The next major pitfall for CRM is to focus only on the operational aspects
of the program. Like any process automation activity, the application of
technology can make things go faster, but the benefit can become a
liability if the process itself is bad. To avoid "automating your own
incompetence," good CRM must be able to monitor, measure and improve
the business processes on a continual basis. It's no surprise that CRM
analytics are getting more and more attention, but it's surprising how
much of the analysis is limited to a single function, failing to provide
true insight that can support operational improvement. Reports detailing
activity and results for marketing or for service are better than nothing,
but they won't address the basic goal of giving the right customers the
right level of effort.
To illustrate, a company might follow a thought process as follows:
We'll get finance to give us a list of all our customers, sorted by how
much they've bought from us. This should tell us who's worth the most
attention, right? Not if we also pull from our SFA system the expected
future revenue by customer and mix it in to create portfolio value. Good
enough? Not if we want to consider service costs, which may include
special contractual commitments or service level agreements that soak up
revenues to create a better idea of profitability. Now, we can focus our
efforts on the most profitable customers, right? Well, it might be better
to weigh their current satisfaction index and focus our efforts on the
customers with the highest value who are at risk of defecting as evidenced
by their low satisfaction. Just creating this report involves analytics
that can draw from a multitude of sources across the enterprise.
Implementing the practice of good CRM involves feeding the output of the
analysis back into the operational system to modify its behavior to focus
more effort on the right customers -- priority queuing, routing to better
skill sets, "first-class" treatment that corresponds to their
analyzed value.
Good CRM Is Pervasive
Finally, the obvious pitfall that accompanies this enterprisewide
operational and analytical involvement is ensuring that the system is
accessible by those who need it. If the business goal is to empower every
person who can help shape customer experiences to act with insight and
consistency, then this empowerment must be pervasive, reaching the
individuals wherever they work. Deployment and maintenance of applications
on every user's system is laborious, costly and, in some cases,
impractical. Your customers won't want to install applications in order to
get self-service empowerment, and your suppliers and partners are not
going to install their customers' applications in order to facilitate
collaboration. Good CRM is pervasive, supporting every role -- customers,
suppliers and employees across every channel: face, voice, e-mail, Web,
pager and more, as they relate to every touchpoint -- marketing sales,
service, finance, production, fulfillment, administration and development.
Only this enterprisewide support can ensure that your company will manage
every approaching expectation into an experience that exceeds it, and
deliver on the promise of good CRM.
Transform Expectations Into Great Experiences
To avoid the most common errors of CRM, you need a recipe for success.
A successful CRM program must be integrated, insightful and
across-the-board. Integrated CRM allows your entire enterprise to align
around the common goal of exceeding the expectations of your customers. It
must be embraced and supported by the entire enterprise, which demands the
attention and endorsement of senior management. Insightful CRM enables you
to truly understand which customers your efforts should focus on, and how
to continually optimize your enterprise to meet their needs. The only
constant in business is change, and the days of gut-feel decision-making
are fading fast. Pervasive CRM leverages technologies such as pure
Internet applications and wireless communications to enable everyone who
makes your enterprise work -- your customers, your employees and your
suppliers, to easily access applications and analysis, wherever they may
be. The enterprise is dynamic and fluid, and connected by the Internet.
The fundamental benefits of the Internet -- global reach, platform
independence and consistent usability -- must be harnessed by your
business systems. Together, these abilities will foster a successful CRM
program that transforms expectations into great experiences, forming the
foundation of competitive advantage, growth and profitability.
Edward Schreyer joined PeopleSoft, Inc. in 2000 as the vice
president of Strategic Marketing for Customer Relationship Management. He
is responsible for directing marketing initiatives and setting the
strategic direction for PeopleSoft's CRM product line.
[ Return
To The January 2001 Table Of Contents ]
|