Make your CRM work for you.
Putting in a operational CRM system to support your customer facing teams always seems like a good idea. However, as most organisations have discovered, it’s a lot harder than it appears. CRM still has a high failure rate - be prepared for your CRM implementation.
Making your CRM work for you business means that you will first need to work out the ‘strategic’ component of CRM, for your context and organisation. This will provide you with your intent for CRM which will guide your implementation. The operational component of CRM will then make a lot more sense to everyone involved. And then you need to give some thought to analytical CRM - what will be the data flows, what data will you collect, analyse and use..?
Want to know more about this approach, try these blog articles:
This top 10 will make your CX and CRM efforts more successful
CRM, the great misnomer
The Value of your Customer Portfolio
Why your business needs a customer strategy
Get Your Business Ready for CRM
A technology trigger in the mid-1990's started a boom with CRM systems. Today CRM apps are easily accessible and often free. As a project CRM has always had a high failure rate (around 70%), mainly because the benefits are not well defined, and the business processes behind the CRM are not clear.
Recognising how the three core types of CRM interplay is critical to setting your CRM up for success. Strategic CRM is really your customer strategy, what are you trying to achieve with your various customer groups..? Operational CRM is the automation of your sales and service activity with your customers. Analytic CRM is where the gold is. You will be collecting a huge amount of data, ensuring you leverage this for key insights for improvement is the long term benefit from CRM.
So whether you are implementing a CRM or trying to get more out of the one you have, consider how the three types of CRM apply to your context, your customers and the results you are seeking.
Read more about designing your customer engagement in this blog article:
Profit by design – build your business for the experience economy.
Take the quick CRM assessment to see how you are going with CRM
This assessment tool takes a quick look into the five core components of organisational competency and how they are aligned to maximising the value from CRM.
There are seven criteria for each component:
Strategy, Customer Strategy, Channels and Engagement, Data Management and Operational. This Swift Scan will give you a quick overview of where your business is at now, and give you some tips on where to start your improvement efforts.
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