December 5, 2001

Failsafe: 10 Steps to CRM Payback

Focusing on these goals during implementation can save your organization a lot of time and money in the end

By Jay-Louise Weldon

Continued from Page 1

These definitions will also guide integration choices, so lack of clarity can result in data errors. If "Revenue" (computed as "Revenue After Returns") is imported from a finance department data source but associated with a customer as "Revenue" (where "Gross Revenue" should be reported), any analyses based on that information will be flawed.

Furthermore, the quality of the data must be evaluated at the source and steps must be taken to improve that quality where it is found to be badly out of line. For example, if customer descriptive information such as shipping address is taken from an unreliable (low quality) source, the use of that information by a callcenter agent or by a customer segmentation program can result in errors that actually impede CRM.

TEAR DOWN THOSE WALLS

CRM is all about sharing customer information so that all parts of the organization see the same view of the customer and treat the customer accordingly. Unfortunately, many companies are used to compartmentalized data stores and boundaries that delineate "my data" from "your data." For example, if you call the credit card division of your bank, the call-center agent may not be aware that you also hold deposit accounts and a mortgage. To achieve the full value of CRM, you must eliminate these boundaries and artificial constraints and relax the availability of customer information. CRM implementations that over-regulate access to information will ultimately fail.

REMOVE CHANNEL BLINDERS

Customer interactions take place in several different ways and via multiple channels. Call centers, Web sites, partners, and distributors are each separate means of interacting with and transacting with customers. Thus, CRM initiatives that focus on a single channel or focus separately on separate channels miss the mark.

CRM is intended to offer the customer a consistent experience without regard to the channel involved. That consistency depends on a CRM strategy and implementation that is coordinated across channels and can ensure that information is shared and available, regardless of which channel the customer chooses. For example, customers should be able to choose which channel — phone, email, or Web chat — works best for them at a given point in time. In return, customer service representatives should be capable of viewing customers' prior interactions across all those channels and be able to respond based on customers' preferences.

LEARN FROM OTHERS' MISTAKES

If your company is embarking on a CRM initiative, learn from those who went before you. Build the following action plan for your CRM implementation:

• Start with a CRM strategy that aligns with business objectives and priorities and is unified across the organization.
• Incorporate business process changes as well as technology enhancements in your strategy and planning.
• Be guided by an overall architecture that addresses immediate objectives, yet leaves room for extensions for new types of customer interactions. This architecture should contain a customer intelligence data warehouse and various data marts to satisfy your analytic requirements.
• Plan your full solution in advance carefully but develop it incrementally.
• Test and monitor the quality of your data and keep the detail intact.
• Make customer information freely available to all those who interact with customers across all channels.
• Put the knowledge you gain from your CRM environment into action to make a difference in your bottom line.

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Jay-Louise Weldon [jaylouise@eds.com] is a managing consultant with EDS's CRM services group based in New York. She has more than 20 years of experience designing business intelligence and CRM solutions.

RESOURCES

Related Articles at IntelligentEnterprise.com:

"The Customer Rules," July 23, 2001

"To Protect and to Serve," June 29, 2001

"Stand and Deliver," March 27, 2001

IntelligentCRM Community: www.IntelligentCRM.com

WHICH CRM STRATEGY?

To more clearly understand some of the issues and approaches toward implementing a CRM strategy, consider the following two examples.

Company A is a large publishing organization comprising several somewhat independent divisions founded 25 years ago. Company A embarked on the road to CRM by hiring consultants from a well-known CRM "think tank" to develop an enterprisewide implementation strategy. Representatives of each division were appointed to a CRM Guidance Committee chaired by the COO, and strategy development took three months.

Next, a member of the COO's staff was appointed CRM "czar" with responsibility for developing and executing tactical plans for implementing the CRM strategy. From the strategy, Company A developed a portfolio of projects that would be required to move toward an "ideal state" with respect to CRM. Some of these projects involved technology while others focused on business process changes; some were within the confines of a single division, others were cross-division.

Interdependencies and data flows among these projects were identified at the start. The projects were sized and prioritized. Every attempt was made to keep each project to a four to six month timeframe. A program office was established to manage and coordinate the various projects so that they could be performed concurrently where possible.

Company A is now in its second year of implementation and expects to achieve its vision in full by the 20th month.

Company B is a telemarketing and services organization spun-off three years ago from a much larger manufacturing organization. Although customer relationships are the basis for its business, Company B never defined a CRM strategy. Instead, it focused its time and resources on developing a sophisticated, highly customized contact center to support service requests from its customers. Because no plan existed to analyze or reuse the information from customer contacts, this operational data was discarded after 90 days.

After a year of operation, management decided that certain customer information would be required to plan and execute promotions and outbound marketing campaigns. Attempts were made to access this information directly from the call-center databases; however, this process slowed operational performance considerably. Instead, a series of extracts were created to move data from the call-center database into a separate data mart for analysis.

Today, Company B managers — from the CEO, to sales and marketing, to IT — all have a different perspective on what CRM means. Internet companies have surpassed Company B in their ability to track customer interactions and provide recommendations to repeat customers.

At Company B, IT is struggling to migrate the underlying data architecture to a more mature model, which is less directly tied to call-center operations. Marketing and sales are demanding more data, views of data, and frequent refreshes for their analysis environment. These demands again threaten to degrade operational performance.

As data volumes grow — both current and historical — Company B is grappling with managing this data. What it perceives as a liability is in reality a huge, untapped asset that it could use to improve and extend customer relationships.

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