Top Reasons for CRM Success

Key steps have emerged over years of CRM implementations that tend to separate successes from
failures.

Set the CRM Vision: Clear and Definable Goals and Expectations
An old proverb said that you can go anywhere as long as you start from where you are, not from where
you think or wish you might be.
Leading a CRM effort starts with looking at your company as customers do. How is your customer
relationship management operating now? Top executives should take steps such as answering an ad,
calling your toll-free number for service, placing an order, and signing up to get emails.
In a successful initiative, your entire company will be deepening its ability to see better from the
customer's point of view.
What are your company's value proposition and competitive advantage in their eyes? How can you
improve each of these attributes?
How do your employees answer these questions?
What customer needs can you serve better?
What feedback mechanisms can you set up to measure these perceptions -- both now and after CRM
implementation? You'll need these mechanisms to carefully quantify the business case for your CRM
effort. The feedback you gather will document your eventual progress. It's critical that you develop
objectives that are measurable, and have key performance metrics in place.
As you become customer-centric, look at your competitors the way your customers see them. What are
competitors doing for your customers that the customers like?
Less-successful CRM initiatives, instead of looking from the customer's point of view at the company,
look from the company's point of view at the customer, in an effort to extract more value.

Gather Requirements Carefully

Your business units and the IS department must agree on what customer-related data is needed, where it
will come from, and how it will be gathered and distributed.
It's critical to prioritize the order in which business areas, such as marketing, sales and service, will be
addressed.
It may be wise to have executives from the marketing, sales and service areas be on a CRM committee,
as they lead the teams that will benefit most from the CRM effort.
This is the time to re-engineer your business processes with the optimal customer experience in mind.
It's also an opportunity to increase procedural effectiveness and reduce costs. For instance, a wellthought-out system can eliminate and reduce the duplicate manual entry of customer data.
You're automating processes. Don't make the mistake some businesses do of automating bad ones.

Set the Implementation Strategy Carefully

Choose small, well-defined parameters for your pilot program, and spend time refining the key
performance indicators. Remember the old saying that "you can't improve what you can't measure."
Make sure you have a project leader who has the experience to manage project scope carefully. It's
inevitable that change requests will occur, and they'll likely put great pressure on the budget, timeline,
and overall chances of success. Keep focused on your initial milestones and be sure to deliver them.
Avoid the natural tendency to try to do too much too soon.

Motivate and Train Your People

It will be natural for your employees to resist change. They have procedures and processes they're
already familiar with. Salespeople, especially, tend to have their own individual systems for doing their
jobs, from notebooks to index cards to PDA's. You need to get buy-in. It's important to consult with your
employees, get their feedback, and constantly show each of them how they will benefit from the
changes. People give up familiar processes IF they see there's something better ahead.
Training must be accessible and ongoing. The most important time for training is in the months after
deployment.
Set realistic expectations, provide ongoing feedback, announce milestones, and reward early gains,
perhaps with incentives. The entire organization needs to collaborate as it delivers more customer value
and becomes more customer-centric.

Ensure Quality Data

Part of your training needs to focus everyone on the need for accurate, complete data. Emphasize to
employees that great customer data is the key to unlocking customer value. Show each person how they
will benefit. Make everyone aware of how marketing campaigns can be monitored more effectively,
more accurate sales forecasts can come together more quickly, and add-on sales will be easier.
Set clear standards for data quality. Communicate them widely. Make someone the champion of clean
data. Devise a plan for checking and maintaining data to ensure it is accurate and clean.

Engage in Continuous Improvement

You've set up mechanisms for employee, partner and customer feedback. As you gather that feedback,
take part in continuous improvement. Refine your strategies and processes, set new goals, and devise
tactics to achieve them. Monitor the entire system for employee participation and make sure it's getting
accurate and complete data.
You might consider setting up incentive bonuses for people based on increasing customer satisfaction.
These are some of the most common steps that have resulted in CRM success and solid ROI.

Top Reasons for Failure

Depending on the source you're reading, as many as 50-70% of CRM initiatives fail to deliver as
expected. Observing these situations, it's possible to discover some common reasons for failure.

CRM Strategy Errors

The right leadership is not in place
A business leader needs to be in charge of the CRM effort, not IT. Successful CRM is a major business
initiative, not a technology initiative.

CRM Strategy not clear

Your CRM strategy and vision need to define what customers experience at each touchpoint, and how
will they be handled at each touchpoint. The vision needs to be clear to everyone. A major pitfall occurs
when your business constituents have differing expectations of CRM's benefits. Sharing a common
vision is key.

The CRM strategy is different from the business strategy

CRM is sometimes seen as a lower level automation step or patch, rather than a top level re-thinking of
how customers are served. Your CRM strategy and business strategy need complete alignment.

Processes not re-designed

CRM is an expensive way to automate inefficient or ineffective processes.
Companies get better results from CRM when they begin by focusing on sales processes: how do
customers need to be approached, convinced, served and satisfied? Only when these questions are
answered should steps be taken to plan software or process changes.
By managing and measuring the sales processes (opportunity management?and "sales method?in CRM
terms) it is possible to take full advantage of CRM's potential. The steps taken should include:
Defining and developing new market segments
Increasing the ability to:
o Cross-sell
o Up-sell
o Retain
o Acquire
o Reactivate
o Experience (Enhancement through better customer interaction strategies)

Customers not consulted

What do your customers think of your company before, during, and after the CRM implementation?
What are they happy with, and what are their complaints? How are other suppliers serving them in ways
that they like? Too often, surprisingly enough, the "C" in "CRM" is not consulted in all phases of the
initiative.

Unclear metrics
It's critical to review your plan to measure key performance indicators, and ROI. Can your metrics truly
determine the real business value of your effort? The quality of metrics has been a deciding factor in
making or breaking many CRM projects.

Implementation Errors
Inability to link channels
Have you considered ALL customer touchpoints and processes? CRM projects often have focused on
some parts of the customer experience, but ran into trouble when they were unable to link with or serve
well all parts of the customer experience.

Lack of preparedness for continuous improvement

Be ready for bumps in the road. Be ready to refine strategies, revise goals, re-set metrics, and learn from
feedback. Successful CRM projects are rarely completely successful from the outset.

People errors
Introducing CRM to hundreds of employees at a time
It's easy to want to do too much, too fast. Get it right first with a small team of employees chosen to
represent a cross-section of your company. Choose an initial project that can make a dramatic difference,
with clear key performance indicators. Strong pilot results will help you avoid the next pitfall:

Changing the system, but not the people

It's easy to focus too much on the new technologies and processes rather than focusing first on the people
who will use them successfully. You need employee excitement about doing a better job for customers.
You need employee feedback and overall buy-in. The entire company needs to own "customer-first."
They need to see that the CRM vision you all hold takes them to a better place than where they are now.

Process errors
Instead of enhancing new processes, changing the CRM system to fit old processes
To avoid the pain of revision, some companies don't take the opportunity to re-engineer and optimize
their processes. They look to CRM as a patch rather than an opportunity from the ground up to increase
customer satisfaction, revenue, service and overall productivity.

Technology Errors
Customer data is in more places than expected
As implementation gets underway, key data can turn up in salespeople's PDA's, spreadsheets,
handwritten notes, and legacy systems. To avoid surprise integration nightmares, the requirements
gathering stage needs to be careful and thorough.

Different CRM solutions are in place but do not work well together.
Often marketing, sales and service departments already have different types of CRM software, from
different vendors, to track the same customers. As a result, these departments can't share data, and have
redundant support and administration costs.

Customer Management Errors

Customers do not experience new benefits
The ultimate test is to be able to demonstrate increased satisfaction among customers, along with
increased customer value to your business. This goal can inform every choice you make during planning
and implementation. But just like the adage "watch the ball" in sports, it's a fundamental often
overlooked.
Your vendor's experience with CRM implementation is one of your best assets. See a selection of leading
vendors.