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Make your customers say “Wow”: Can’t miss tips for Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management (CRM) can deliver tremendous advantage to a business of any size, but the possibility of a CRM implementation failing is a very real one. Yet if CRM is carried out with a sound strategy, your odds of success are good. The reason for CRM failure is usually not with the software itself. Customer relationship management software has entered a stage of maturity, and most offerings deliver a feature-rich environment designed with customer service and ease of use in mind. Rather, the reasons for failure typically lie with the implementation itself, the preparation, and the lack of a solid plan.
Don’t lose sight of the customer
The goal of a customer relationship management implementation is to forge a deeper and closer relationship between a company and its customers. This close relationship helps the company better understand the customer’s own preferences, goals, and desires, and this information can be used to create a more customer-friendly environment-and ultimately, improved sales. However, a company will often get bogged down in the implementation, the details, and the politics of CRM, and lose sight of the original goal. A CRM implementation can be highly political within the company, simply because it is a large system that touches multiple departments. A full-fledged customer relationship management system is likely to bring change to an organization, and with change, there is always resistance and political in-fighting. When that happens, the goal of CRM is lost.
Maintain the “big picture”
Along those same lines, another common cause of customer relationship management failure is to implement it on a departmental level. CRM is an enterprise system that touches every customer-facing area in the company, and the only way to do it successfully is to have complete cooperation between departments. This means that the implementation needs to start at the boardroom level and filter down through all departments. A single departmental CRM implementation will be of little use, often because customer relationship management requires input and data from many different stakeholders throughout the entire enterprise.
The CRM implementation, after getting buy-in from the C-level staff, is organized strategically at the top, and then implemented tactically at the departmental level to achieve the greatest level of success.
Clearly state your needs and goals
A customer relationship management implementation may also fail due to a lack of clearly defined goals. It’s easy to be sold on the value of CRM, but before an implementation, it is necessary to conduct a thorough needs analysis that encompasses all customer-facing areas of the company. Clearly state your goals in specific terms. What areas do you hope to improve on? Is your goal, for example, to improve delivery times, or to streamline the ordering process? State those goals with clear metrics. Since each department will have multiple goals that pertain more specifically to one area, the goals of each department need to be brought together, to ensure that they are not conflicting in any way, and then a roadmap for the enterprise CRM implementation can be created. Only then will it be practical to consider a customer relationship management implementation.
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