Customer relationship management done right

Five crucial steps to support CRM success

By Darren Saumur

Now, more than ever, the customer is king. Increased competition, global networks and an ever-expanding array of goods and services have combined to make that age-old maxim today’s business reality. Not surprisingly, smart businesses want to get to know their customers better. In fact, a recent study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that more than 40% of business leaders view deeper customer relationships as a key weapon in the battle for market share. 

Enter today’s updated and enhanced customer relationship management (CRM) tools. CRM is all about understanding, attracting and maintaining customers. Most companies in Canada recognize CRM’s ultimate benefits, and place it high on their wish lists for IT investment. The right CRM system, providing immediate access to key customer information for all employees, can be critical to the success, or even survival, of your organization. So what do you need to know to ensure your business gets it right when implementing a CRM solution?  

Quite a bit, it turns out.

Often, businesses don’t take the necessary steps to ensure a project’s success before beginning their CRM implementation. At the outset, companies must recognize that CRM is far more involved than merely choosing a software application and implementing it — CRM is a business strategy, with all the planning, organization and enterprise education that such a process entails.

One company that did get CRM right was Sony of Canada, which invested in a CRM system to drive e-mail campaigns. By carefully following a detailed, step-by-step process, Sony obtained the system it needed. The final application enabled the company to analyze customer data, determine target audiences and quickly execute multi-channel campaigns during the holiday selling season. The result? Stronger customer relationships, greater efficiencies, better use of staff time, cost savings, increased customer satisfaction and more effectively targeted marketing strategies.

Sony of Canada understands that organizations must do their due diligence before implementation to maximize returns on a CRM system. In fact, five key considerations must be addressed thoroughly and thoughtfully. Otherwise, the project will be at risk from the outset.

1. Align CRM strategy to company goals

Two critical questions need to be asked before beginning the project:

• What are our pressing business issues and our goals, both short-term and long term?
• How will CRM help address these issues and allow our company to reach its goals?

An all-too-common reason CRM fails to fulfill its promise is lack of a strongly aligned CRM strategy — the backbone of a successful implementation. An organization must determine what needs to be accomplished to generate success. If your goal is to increase customer retention, your organization must understand the key drivers of retention and how CRM can enable and enhance that process. Before implementation, think strategically about your company’s business processes and the steps you must take to fix the problems you face. CRM can greatly enhance customer service, but only if the business strategy is well defined and professionally applied.

To get the most out of CRM, consider a complete solution that can 1) evolve to meet all of a fast-growing company’s business needs and strategic requirements and 2) ensures everyone in the organization — from customer-facing employees to back-office workers — has access to all the CRM data necessary to serve customers better.

2. Make the business case

You must understand how CRM will improve your company’s bottom line and communicate this to the executive team to:

• gain the support of key internal stakeholders in going ahead with the project;
• be given the means to ensure its success; and
• forecast the results and benefits that CRM will bring to your organization.

Why does your business need CRM? Will CRM ease collaboration between departments? Will it allow your call centre to better serve the customer and potentially up-sell new offerings? Know exactly where you plan to see results, and emphasize the importance of these potential achievements to staff whose support is critical for the project’s success. 

3. Better input maximizes output

Knowing where you are and where you want to be is critical to determining the steps required to reach your goals and ultimately measure the success of a CRM system.

CRM isn’t just about tracking your performance, it’s about improving it. The inputs to a CRM system are critical to ensuring the outputs provide the information your company can use to its optimum advantage. Knowing the information that you need to collect to obtain constructive and valuable information is essential, and will dramatically improve the likelihood you will maximize your CRM project and achieve the results you require.

4. Review and improve processes

While CRM will provide a better understanding of your customers and how you can serve them, it can’t perform magic. Those operating the system must use it properly. Your staff members need to know what information is critical to your organization, how to qualify that information and how to use it to your company’s advantage. Otherwise, your investment in human capital will negate your CRM investment and diminish its return.

Employers must be aware of the holes in their current operations, and which ones need to be plugged to maximize the new-found ability to use key information. It’s critical to make the necessary changes and improvements before CRM data begins to be collected.

5. Support breeds success

Depending on the scope of your CRM strategy, your project could be deployed company-wide. As such, the right team needs to be in place to ensure your organization is prepared for the implementation, confident in CRM’s value and able to integrate CRM seamlessly into existing systems. Generally, three kinds of individuals are crucial to ensuring your system is in, up and on track.

Executive sponsor

An executive sponsor has a deep understanding of the business across the enterprise and possesses the vision to know how the CRM project’s various processes fall into place. The executive sponsor is usually a member of the senior management team (CIO, CTO, CFO) and is someone who can generate support for the project among all levels and across the company.

Project champions

Champions communicate the project status to other internal stakeholders, act as first-level support to fellow users, and collect and pass along enhancements from the user community to the sponsor. Project champions are key in building a user community that believes they are a part of the process as opposed to having the process forced upon them.

Technologists

Regardless of what a system can do, it will ultimately fail if it is not implemented properly. Upon launch, you must have the right team to deploy your applications, be ready to collect key information and be able to use it — immediately — to your company’s benefit.

Choose your IT vendors carefully. Ensure that your IT partner is reliable, possesses expertise in rolling out CRM systems, has a strong existing customer base (with customer references) and takes the time and energy to understand your specific challenges and needs.

A CRM project that is done right can lead to significant and numerous benefits, including more effective marketing campaigns, more accurate delivery of goods and services and more revenue with higher margins. CRM allows a company to align its employees and groups around common objectives — customer attraction, satisfaction and retention — by providing visibility to customer information and collaboration across the enterprise.

However, your organization must properly consider and assess the five crucial steps outlined above, and recognize CRM’s larger role as an integrated business strategy. In the land of the king, you are courting failure if you don’t do CRM right.

Darren Saumur (darren.saumur@sap.com) is the senior vice-president of professional services for SAP Canada Inc..