Is your company ready for CRM technologies?

The first principle of CRM is that technology in itself will never provide great customer service. After that, with the right organisational culture, the technology tools necessary to facilitate the delivery of great service to hundreds or even thousands of customers have matured considerably, are readily available and affordable to a wide range of businesses.

Meet customer's needs

CRM is about retaining information about customers and then using that information at a later stage to meet the customer's needs more accurately. As such, advancements in the technology are focused around easing the data gathering process, making it easier to store that information in a manner which makes sense, combining data from different sources, and finally, presenting the information to the user in a form which adds business value and delivers solid business insight.

Based on my observation, there are typically a number of different customer interactions in any given organisation, which may occur through a variety of channels. A traditional issue was that the information related to the customer was distributed and occurred in an uncoordinated fashion. Added to that is the reality that the representatives dealing with customers are faced with the task of a separate external system for the collection of relevant data, and one can see potential reasons for the failure of early CRM solutions.

With new products focused around internal integration, the ability for companies to deploy integrated CRM solutions which don't require onerous information entry or tedious data extraction before they can deliver value are a reality. Furthermore, as intimated, CRM to an extent depends on effective analysis of raw data, a concept more traditionally associated with business intelligence (BI). BI is in fact an essential aspect of CRM.

Deployment

That takes care of the technology equation. But what about deployment methodology? How a solution is provided is critical to its potential success. A ‘big bang' approach, I believe, is potentially flawed, given the amount of data, the many requirements of an organisation [one division may use CRM very differently from another] and the challenges and risks of managing enormous projects.

A better route, and one which we have seen deliver value for many clients, is to deploy CRM in response to direct needs. This has the effect of faster time-to-deploy, the ability of demonstrating value quickly, and establishing confidence in the business owners of the value of CRM.

However, I must say that for CRM to deliver true value, the tools and technologies have to compliment an appropriate organisational culture. CRM solutions are a means to an end. It is the customer and his satisfaction that is the end in itself.