If you’re evaluating a CRM suite in particular, you may have heard a lot of horror stories about CRM investments going to waste. Rest assured, it’s not the technology; cases of outright technology failure are rare in e-business, and their heyday was years ago, when a lot of applications were in their early generations.
Much more often, CRM failure has to do with the old saying, much beloved of coaches, that goes, Fail to plan, plan to fail. This is the point emphasized by Mike Murphy, executive director of Siebel Global Services. Addressing his company’s CRM audience some months ago, Murphy remarked, “If you focus on technology as the only aspect of a customer-facing solution, you’re going to have a fairly high-risk project.”
This truism of CRM has been out there for years, but it seems not all adopters have paid attention. “People frequently do not take into account the lessons of those that have gone before them,” Murphy tells Line56. “They will ignore some of the warnings.”
It’s part of a larger pattern in which CRM adopters haven’t conducted due diligence about the state of their own company, or of customers. Take the case of Cisco, which bought hosted CRM from Salesforce.com but subsequently came to realize that user behavior rejected the tool in favor of existing applications. That’s something that the company should have known from the CRM get-go, either causing it to pass up Salesforce.com altogether or else paying increased attention to the change management needed to embed Salesforce.com.
That’s a case of not knowing how CRM users behave, but Murphy knows of plenty of other cases in which a customer strategy has been missing. “When we do a post-mortem on these projects, we see that a customer strategy is lacking, or isn’t linked to a corporate strategy.”
For example, a manufacturer might be tasked to use CRM to do order management in order to improve cross-sell numbers, but might not have segmented the customer base properly. The customers might be craving cross-divisional solutions, not the discrete products currently offered by the manufacturer. But you’d never learn this by implementing order management.
Murphy offers a simple, three-step guide to avoiding CRM failure: 1. Align IT and business about what CRM-addressable problems are, and what to do about them; 2. Articulate a customer strategy, and how it links to corporate goals as well as to the proposed CRM system; and 3. Define goals in a measurable way so you can track your progress.
That’s what you should have on your mind when you think about a CRM suite, or even a component tool. Otherwise, as Murphy says, you might end up with “the technology piece working, but no results.”
David Cowgill is a Senior CRM Marketing Manager in San Francisco.
Article Source: http://www.crmblogger.com/crm/2005/09/avoiding_crm_fa.html
For further information contact: David Cowgill CRM Blog Founder http://www.crmblogger.com
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The Many Facets of CRM Software
When hearing the term CRM, or customer relationship management, software, a person generally thinks that it’s a fancy, computerized address book. They don’t think that there are any other reasons for using this type of software. Those who don’t use CRM don’t see the point in it. They fail to realize what it can really do and how much it has to offer as a multi-faceted technological tool for keeping track of a growing customer base. True, it does keep track of names and email information and addresses.
Why shouldn’t it? Those things are important and too many people today have trouble with their businesses because they lose those kinds of things – and therefore lose customers as well. People who spend money with your business don’t want to be forgotten; they want to be remembered and appreciated. CRM software can help you do that without breaking the bank and without feeling that you have to wrack your brain every time someone walks into your store or calls on the phone.
Some customers will certainly stick in your mind – perhaps they made a very large purchase, have a unique name, or are a bit eccentric. For the majority of people, however, they are forgettable from a business standpoint not because they are unimportant but simply because there are so many of them. CRM software is a great way to ‘remember’ not only their names but their preferences and what they’ve purchased in the past. If they’ve called customer service with a problem or even just with a comment it’s important that the information they provide be stored so that it can be retrieved next time. The people who call in to customer service or who shop online, on the phone, or in person often don’t think about the way that their information is collected and stored, and they don’t understand what CRM actually is. When they want to do business they simply expect everyone at the company to know who they are and take care of them – which usually does happen, but sometimes the computers are down and this causes issues.
For the businesses who use CRM, there is a lot that can be done with it. Conversations are recorded and information is collected and stored so that people don’t have to give their information again and again. It’s important for them and it’s a convenience that wasn’t available before CRM became popular. For those who do not want their information out there for everyone to potentially hack into, however, there is little that they can do to hide it. There are no opt-out lists for this kind of information because companies say that they need to keep it for billing and for other issues. Companies will not erase it for you, and even if they did the call that you made to ask them to do so would be recorded ‘for quality assurance.’ CRM is here to stay, and businesses – as well as most consumers – are very glad to have it.
If you need assistance with CRM, visit a site focusing on CRM software
The site provides reviews on everything from web based to various open source CRM solutions. Not only that, the site gives salespeople the tools to make these tools even more effective. To have Michielle Beck write for you, contact her through her Website
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