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Avoiding CRM's
Common Pitfalls - Part 5
(parts 1-4* of this
series can be found in previous issues linked below)
Our series on avoiding the common pitfalls of CRM implementations
covers 7 key areas:
-
Viewed as a technical, not a business, problem
-
Driven from the top down
-
Lack
of senior management involvement
-
Not
targeting the areas of highest adoption
-
Driven by the IT organization vs. business leaders accountable
for the numbers
-
Trying to do too much at once
-
Lack
of organizational readiness
This
article will review the final 2 pitfalls of CRM implementations:
Trying to do too much at once - Make no mistake implementing
CRM is a big initiative. And, a key element underlying all CRM
initiatives is the need to integrate access to all customer
information. Many implementations have failed simply because the
project was too aggressive.
STRATEGY: Identify the 3-5 highest priority areas to target and
implement them. Once implemented, let them “burn-in” to the
environment. In parallel with the burn-in period, begin work on
the next 3-5 highest priority areas. Continue this cycle.
Lack
of Organizational Readiness - Business change requires the
proper balance of people, process, and technology. CRM initiatives
are often technology driven, with plenty of focus on the systems
and even the processes to support them. However, one of the most
important aspects of successful CRM implementation is
Organizational Readiness.
By its
nature, CRM is usually a cross-functional, company-wide initiative
aimed at creating a single face to the customer. To present this
single face, the multiple groups within a company must agree on
what that face should look like.
Creating a truly integrated CRM system not only requires defining
consistent technologies and processes across multiple
organizations; it also requires consistency of data elements and
terminology. Sometimes this means compromise. When individual
groups within an organization are unable or unwilling to
compromise to achieve this kind of consistency, CRM will fail.
Whenever multiple groups are brought together to achieve a single
purpose, there must be rules in place in order to keep people
aligned to the same goals. For instance, is there an
organizational hierarchy? Are there certain areas where one group
has absolute veto power? Overall, though, CRM should be viewed as
bettering the entire company, not necessarily an individual group.
Thus, it should be acceptable for a particular group to be worse
off with a specific change, as long as the organization, as a
whole, is improved. Of course, the particular group that is worse
off may not like this approach. It is an important responsibility
of senior management to set realistic expectations as to what sort
of compromise might be necessary to successfully implement CRM.
STRATEGY: CRM should be considered a company-wide initiative, and
no one group should have the ability to derail such a broad
endeavor. For CRM to be successful, the organization must be
prepared to compromise, and must always remember that the whole
organization is more important than any one group.
Previous Issues in this series:
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Reduce the Stress in Selecting Your Call Management System –
Part 2
By
Bill Tobin
Create a
Requirements Document and identify twelve vendors
The first article in this series discussed organizing your search
for a call management solution by identifying a project manager,
creating a project plan and holding a kick-off meeting. Now it’s
time to define your functional needs and identify potential
vendors to open discussions with. Both these tasks can and should
be done in parallel.
Let’s
start by gathering your company’s operational and user
requirements. Schedule time with any cross-functional team’s
manager or vendor who will be inputting, accessing or expecting
data output from your call management system. These managers
should have already attended your kick-off meeting, so they are
aware of what information you will need from them. Sort their
requirements into “must have” and “nice to have” buckets. A vendor
who cannot meet all your “must haves” should be eliminated from
the pack. Don’t forget to setup meetings with the managers that
own and support your operational infrastructure. Your new
application will require a server (or two), a system administrator
to perform backups and regular maintenance along with possible
integration to system monitoring tools and the Internet. Will this
application be implemented in an Oracle environment? Will you
require notification to subject matter experts via Lotus Notes or
MS Outlook? Will you be auto-paging these subject matter experts
through a specific cell phone or pager provider? Will you have any
remote users, or will all people entering calls be in the same
building? Gathering answers to questions like these will greatly
help you pare down the vendor list to a short list of qualified
candidates.
The
only thing missing now is your list of vendors. It‘s time to
utilize your investigative skills that you may not even have known
you possessed. You need to build a list of ten to twelve call
management system providers from the 100+ that are out there. Tap
into your customer support and technical staff to find out what
products they have used in prior companies, and find out if they
were satisfied with them. If they were extremely satisfied, get a
contact name from their former company and give them a call.
Tip:
Prior to making this information-gathering phone call, it would
greatly help to have a questionnaire at hand to ensure you gather
all the information you need in one phone call. Questions should
solicit information on the company’s experiences with the
implementation, training, documentation and technical support, as
well as the number of actual users versus licenses purchased. This
questionnaire will also be used later during the formal reference
checking of your short list of vendors.
In
addition to tapping your employee base, send your professional
network (you know you should have one) an email telling them what
you are doing and asking if they have used any superstar vendors
they would recommend.
Don’t
stop there! Jump on the Internet and search through some of the
support industry organizations and magazines for vendor rankings
and articles. Check out the vendor’s websites and cruise through
any online demos that may be available. If your organization has
an online membership to The Gartner Group, or other such
organization, you will be blessed with a wealth of information and
vendor evaluations.
Once
you have the Requirements Document and your short list of vendors,
it’s time to give them a call. An important question to ask them
is their average cost of an implementation of your size. Also ask
where they see themselves fitting in the call management space
regarding price. Are they low-end, medium, or high-end?
Functionality will follow price, so the high-end vendors will
usually carry more bells and whistles, along with unlimited
customizations. Be careful with customizations as this can
sometimes mean professional services fees for any future changes
to those customizations that seemed so important in the beginning.
If you are satisfied with their professionalism and responses,
email them your Requirements Document. Instruct them to respond to
each of your 10-15 requirements, including providing you with the
number of live customer sites they have utilizing each particular
requirement. For example, if operating in an Oracle environment is
mandatory, you do not want to hear that their first Oracle
implementation will be in 4-6 months. If that’s the case, you have
just shaved the competition by one vendor.
At the
conclusion of this research and evaluation, you should be able to
confidently reduce your list of vendors to no more than five,
three would be ideal.
In Part 3 of this series, I will review the Request for Proposal
(RFP) process, including the creation of the document and the
invitation of your short list of vendors to participate.
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By Paul Wilkis
This is an
installment about purchasing relationships with an emphasis on the
term relationship. To borrow a line from SAP, "Your customers
expect your entire enterprise to revolve around them." Customer
Centricity also believes that a business is successful when the
type of focus that you place on the customer is just as sharp as
the focus that you use throughout your enterprise. While a large
part of our work focuses on improvements that can be made in the
areas of your business that touch the customer, your bottom line
is also affected by other areas of the company. The area that I
will address is in the area of Purchasing.
Where is the
money going:
Hopefully you are
looking at your expenses on a daily basis. In today's economy we
need to know where every penny goes and why it goes to a
particular vendor. We not only need to know where the money is
going, we also need to know why it is going there and not
somewhere else. The fundamental questions to ask are:
- How were the
decisions made to use a particular vendor?
- Was it
primarily price, delivery time, first vendor in the door because
you needed the product in a hurry and this vendor was available?
- Did this
relationship begin because their salesperson gave a perk to a
decision maker in your company?
We all know that
these are lousy reasons for making a decision, and they may not
even be in your corporate best interests, but you’d be surprised
how many are made this way.
Customer
Centricity's focus in this area is on reexamining your corporate
relationship with every vendor that receives more than a small
percentage of your budget. I am using the term relationship in its
true meaning. When two companies form a contract to buy and sell a
product or service, both sides should see it as a two-way street.
Do you see your contractual vendor relationships as a two-way
street? Can you rely on them to see your enterprise as the most
important customer that they have, even though, most likely, you
are not? You need to know why you originally decided to buy from
this vendor and why you still do. What, besides the contracted
product or service, are you getting from your relationship with
this particular vendor that you cannot get elsewhere? Was the last
contract renewal a perfunctory signing ceremony or did you derive
a real benefit from the renewal that you did not get at the last
renewal? Is it time to change, just for the sake of changing? Do
you feel like your vendors take you for granted? Do you have
relationships with multiple vendors for similar products? Do they
know that they have to work hard to compete for your business?
Central to these
questions is how the particular vendors are chosen. In most cases
where large sums of money are involved, the RFI/RFP process should
be used. While it is cumbersome and, at times, slow, it is an
effective means of product and vendor selection. I am not going to
go into the mechanics of the process here, but to be most
effective, it should be managed by a procurement or contract
specialist who reports progress regularly to senior management and
includes team members from all disciplines that have expertise in
the area. It makes no difference whether the product is for a
router, a laser or a steam shovel; the people who require the
product, the people who will use it, the people who pay for it and
the people who will have to maintain or support it all need to be
involved in the decision process. The RFI/RFP process is an open
process. It takes the arbitrariness out of the decision making and
results in "buy-in" from everyone. However, deciding on a
particular product from a particular vendor should not mean that
you are tied in forever. It is important for all vendors to know
that they have to keep working at maintaining their edge in the
marketplace.
Vendor
relationships with companies who provide less expensive or
commodity products also need to be reviewed on a regular basis.
When was the last time you compared “the big guys” to the local
stationery store down the street. There are times when the guy
down the street will work harder for your money than the large
discount store will. How much is that worth to you? You may pay a
point more but it might be worth it. Only you can decide.
Customer-focused
companies must strive to maximize the value of their customer
relationships. Likewise, they should expect the same of their
vendors, and endeavor to get the most out of their vendor
relationships.
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