While the importance of getting targeted communications out of the door has achieved mainstream awareness, there is still considerable potential for improved return on investment from CRM systems.

Too often, companies are compromising when it comes to communicating with customers and prospects. The lack of attention to the actual delivery of personalised messages to customers or enquirers is making a nonsense of many companies’ marketing strategies.

Arguably, the need for sophisticated mail has never been greater. Customer retention has become a major issue, with today’s multi-channel environment making it easier than ever for consumers to switch brand allegiance. Consumers are acutely aware that the balance of power has shifted in their favour. It is an accepted mantra that attracting new customers costs more than retaining existing customers, and suppliers operate knowing that bad service, or even perceived bad service, is more likely to be met with defection.

Today, businesses of every size are realising that intelligent marketing to existing customers can have a profound impact on customer retention and customer growth. High volume prospecting activity has given way to tailored, targeted communications to existing customers – the first line of attack in the battle to stem customer churn rates.

Building a relationship with the customer via the mailstream, therefore, is becoming an integral part of any business proposition. You need to make sure there are solid IT management systems in place first, however.

To maximise the effectiveness of these customer communications, it is necessary to integrate them with the appropriate business processes they connect with, however disparate these processes may seem to be.

It is the integration of key business processes and their related information streams into CRM that defines and drives Customer Communication Management (CCM). CCM harnesses the power of specific business processes and ties them to the CRM initiative – in order to create, develop, manage, and maintain more effective customer communications.

CRM is fundamentally customer facing and outwardly focused. CCM takes this to the next level, by capturing the external customer information and linking it to internal business processes in order to create a more comprehensive picture of the customer’s behaviour in relation to the company. The goal is then to stay in repeated contact with customers via a continuing stream of out-bound messages that are highly targeted to individual needs and structured to facilitate easy payment or customer action.

But, with so much channel-choice available, is mail still a viable channel? Undeniably, yes. The EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, in tandem with local telephone privacy laws, places increasing limitations on unsolicited prospecting. Mail, however, is often seen as a non-intrusive and valued means of communication by both businesses and consumers. What’s more, response figures remain steady.

Any fears about email displacing mail have long since been dispelled. Contrary to popular belief, Internet users receive more mail than non-Internet users and the difference between the two groups is growing. The claim that a wired household is ripe for substitution is unfounded. Wired households include attractive consumers who will continue to receive mail along with other media from businesses eager to get a greater share of their wallets.

CCM can uncover opportunities for lower costs and higher revenues both by developing customer relationships that are more rewarding in every sense and by streamlining business processes so they are less costly, more integrated and more effective. Put simply, CCM is directly focused on determining the best and most cost-effective way for engaging in a continual and profitable dialogue with your customers.

Sophisticated data collection and analysis techniques are not enough. Businesses must ensure that this sophistication translates to customer-facing documents if the full value of the mail channel is to be realised.

Article written by David Jefferies, Marketing Director Pitney Bowes

Research group after research group report that an extraordinarily high percentage of software projects either fail to meet their goals after completion, are delivered over-budget or late, or are simply cancelled outright.

Gartner says half the projects in their study exceeded their initial budget tolerance by 200%. Standish Group suggests fully 1/3 of software projects are scotched before a single user has drawn benefit from the application.

CRM – Customer Relationship Management – projects are no different; they are subject to the same torques and tensions that tear other projects apart. In fact, the numbers are higher with CRM projects; studies show up to 70% of CRM projects fail. What is the source of so many CRM failures? Are there characteristics of CRM projects that make them especially vulnerable? More important, what are the remedies?

Defining Success

Ask anyone at your company what CRM is, and you’ll get your first clue about the source of the frequent project failures. Too many people, from staff-level to the corner office, from IT to sales, believe that CRM starts and ends with software.

In fact, the core of good CRM is the same as it’s been for decades: the right people executing the right processes, using the best possible tools at their disposal. And these days the ‘best tools’ means software that support the relationships between companies and clients.

To get your project off on the right foot, you’ll need to embrace a balanced view of the current situation that accounts for people, process and technology. That starts with some self-analysis covering all three components:

• Assess and Benchmark your current team. What does the organization look like? Who has a customer-facing role, and what do they do? A basic organizational map, along with a list of each team’s assigned roles is an essential first step. If you don’t know what you have to start with, it’s nearly impossible to map out next steps and improvement points.
• Map out the basic contours of the key customer-centric processes, including those that generate new business, as well as those that work to support existing clients. Who does what and in what order? What tools do they use to accomplish these tasks? Think about supporting processes as well, like prospect generation, lead qualification, or contract writing. The most important rule? Be honest about how it actually works, not how it’s supposed to work.
• Create a vision of the future by modeling the way your customer-centric processes ought to be. Now you can set your “AS-IS” information aside and start working through how things should be. For each existing process, you’ll want a corresponding future state.
• The difference between your IS and SHOULD processes represents your path for change.

While technology is an important piece of CRM, companies that focus solely on buying or building the best IT components will too often become another statistic in another research group’s report. Meanwhile, companies with healthy CRM implementations have inevitably taken into account all three of the primary components for success: people, process, and technology.

CRM Off the Rails

With so much focus on technology, it’s no wonder CRM projects often fall into a second major trap: lack of stakeholder commitment.

When CRM software is seen as a panacea, the important players at a company forget that they have an important part to play in a project’s success. As a consequence, there is an endless parade of organizations who spend millions on software, only to find that their people – field sales professionals, sales engineers, anyone engaged with the client – continue to make the same mistakes they made before.

To get through the surf, all company oars must be in the water, pointed in the same direction, and rowing in unison. Too often companies start down the path of change without key people’s participation, either in body or spirit.

The fact is customer relationship problems are typically organization-wide. They require a commitment from decision-makers and staffers to make real changes to how they operate. Those changes may require new people with a different mix of skills; they may require a new approach from the management team; it may force a company to re-evaluate the way it performs basic tasks. Above all, CRM success is dependent on a company following through on its commitments to align people, processes, and the right technology components.

A CRM project team that follows a few basic steps can go along way to getting those oars lined up:

1. Dream big: define your team’s business priorities. Sure, we know it’s to make customer relationships better, but what does that mean exactly? In one company it may mean shortening the sales cycle, in another it may mean making more up-to-date intelligence to the process. Laying out the company’s needs in discrete, measurable terms is a good way to get everything thinking the same way about solving the problem.
2. Face the truth: acknowledge current challenges. If it were easy, you would have done it by now, right? As a part of the early definition of what you want to fix, you have to acknowledge the obstacles.
3. What’s in it for us? Measure the impact of resolving these challenges. If the problems were resolved and you met your business goals, how much would it help? Measure the hypothetical results in terms of reduced costs, increased revenues, or other hot-button metrics and you’ll start to get everyone’s attention
4. Nothing comes for free: do an honest cost-benefit analysis of making the required changes. This step helps you determine the extent to which the team should go to solve its problems. Consider best-case and worst-case scenarios…and don’t forget to show what happens if you do nothing at all.
5. Write it down: create a CRM business case. You’ll want to define all the points above, and puts it into a format all the stakeholders can quickly read and understand. CRM is an investment, just like building a new factory, or hiring a new employee. Modeling the return on investment is the best case for nudging even the most cautious executives toward making a change.

Snatching Success from the Jaws of Failure

With stakeholder commitment, and a holistic view of the solution that touches people, process, and technology, you must now face the final obstacle on your way to CRM success: failure to plan.

At this point, you’ll notice the stakeholders being drawn to slick CRM software brochures like moths to a bright flame. But there’s work to be done before the team starts thinking about technology.

The IS/SHOULD assessment and the Business Case should be the starting points for an overall CRM Strategic Roadmap. The roadmap defines how the company is actually going to accomplish the required tasks, in a step-by-step fashion. The time horizon for the Strategic Roadmap may extend beyond the immediate budget, and it may become more vague as it discusses steps further into the future. But it’s a critical document because it provides overall direction for the team and for the stakeholders. And above all, it maps specific actions to remedy every need defined in the business case.

The early phases of the CRM Strategic Roadmap should be further defined in the form of an Implementation Plan and Budget. The Implementation Plan offers a specific schedule of events for actually implementing the chosen solution.

People may be impatient for change at your company, but planning pays for itself many times over. Too often the planning process is lampooned as a paralyzing activity that brings projects to a halt. Building the Strategic Roadmap and Implementation Plan & Budget is a critical information-discovery and analysis step, and it’s one that companies who have experienced CRM success know to be essential to a project coming to full fruition.

Conclusion

You might hear that CRM is nothing more than the company rolodex. Or you might believe that CRM software starts and ends with a sales pipeline tool. If you fall for that, you might believe that making improvements to how you win and manage customers is easy. In fact, it requires careful planning, and it requires buy-in from key players in your company, starting in the corner offices and moving down the organizational chart from there.

In the real world, CRM is a system of interconnected elements comprising people, process, and technology; any improvements to that system have to be carefully planned and executed. Fortunately, finding the right mixture of those three ingredients for your company is possible.

The road is treacherous, but with the right approach, you can reach your destination.

Are you ready to go?

If you would like to learn more about how to apply these best practices to your CRM projects, please visit http://www.ismsystems.com/lp/crmfails-webinar.php. Also visit our website www.ismsystems.com or call us at 877-553-0485 to set up a consultation. We look forward to working with you.

ISM helps clients successfully leverage CRM through leadership in strategy, business process requirements, technology selection, implementation, and support. Our methodologies and expertise adhere to the best practices from the most respected minds in the CRM and business process consulting industry.

Steve Snapp is a Sr. CRM Consultant at ISM. He has over 15 years of sales and marketing experience in various industries. Since 1995, Steve has helped build the CRM practice from implementing CRM technology to a full-service CRM consulting firm.

Swain Scheps is a technology professional based in Dallas, Texas. His experience includes solution design and project management in a variety of IT specialties including CRM, Business Intelligence, and E-commerce. He is also a writer and author; his latest book “Business Intelligence for Dummies” (Wiley) came out in 2008.

The email contains your free trial login information which you obviously need. This is true actually for most CRM vendors who offer a free trial but what kind of ruined the momentum of my experience was the fact the confirmation page said “We will contact you by email in the next 24 hours” instead of “you will receive an email in the next few minutes”.

Great, what if I’m on a tight deadline and need to have my CRM recommendation slide deck ready to present to the exec team by tomorrow? Time to cross Entellium off the list I suppose. Here’s the actual confirmation page you get after completing the free trial registration form:

Thank you for your interest in Entellium CRM solutions. We will contact you by email in the next 24 hours to set up
your free trial. Getting started is easy—just enter the User ID and Password included in the email to begin your
free trial.

For a head start, you can learn the basics of CRM, or dive into our interactive CRM demo.

If you’d like to speak with us right now, call 1.800.539.9973.”

I have yet to take the trial myself since at the time of writing this post, I still haven’t gotten an email from them. Regardless I will take a peek at their product in the next day or so (assuming I get the login information email) and see how it fares. I recommend you do the same and give their free trial a whirl but be ready to wait a day until you’re back in the office tomorrow before you can give it a try.

Anyhow, let’s get back on track here. I wanted to share a cool article for those who are doing general freelance work and looking for some cool online tools. It’s not necessarily for people in the CRM industry so if CRM isn’t your domain you can still benefit from this article.