The Right Skill Sets and Mindsets
Because a CRM strategy requires a company's various departments to work more closely together, it changes the dynamics of how people interact and how a company makes decisions. While CRM technology facilitates collaborative decision-making, this very virtue can create tension in fragmented organizations whose members take proprietary attitudes toward data ownership. Managing change is thus critical when implementing a CRM strategy.
The change management required by CRM entails the realigning of skill sets and mindsets. Teaching technical skills without changing attitudes will lead to poor user adoption-one of the recurrent hallmarks of failed implementations.
To support the culture change that CRM requires, many companies have found it necessary to realign their reward systems. This means, for example, that customer satisfaction scores and customer retention will carry more weight in the organization's compensation program than customer acquisition. In addition, the organization may have to reconfigure its commission scheme to support a multichannel strategy. At Cisco Systems, for example, salespeople receive commissions for repeat orders that come in over the Web or through the call center, because Cisco Systems wants its sales force to drive as much business as possible through these lower-cost channels.
The Right Technology
The right technology is the final linchpin in a CRM strategy because it enables an organization to track every customer interaction, regardless of where, when, or how the interaction occurs. The right technology will satisfy the criteria explained in the following sections.
Multichannel Support
A CRM solution must provide an integrated family of sales, marketing, and customer service software applications across all channels, including field sales and service, call centers, resellers, and the internet. This creates a closed-loop system for capturing, organizing, and leveraging detailed information about customers, prospects, and partners so that every customer-facing employee and process operates from the same comprehensive store of logically centralized data: The right hand always knows what the left hand is doing.
For example, a field sales representative can use a laptop to connect to the corporate customer database before making a customer call and find out that the customer had earlier that day logged onto the corporate Web site and spent 15 minutes viewing several recently posted pages detailing a new product offering. Armed with this information, the representative can review the latest positioning information about the new product and prepare a tailored presentation.
Additionally, a consolidated customer data source lets an organization determine the preferences and economics of customer segments. Supported by this knowledge, an organization can determine which marketing campaigns and offers to target to which specific customers, how to design new products and services to meet customers' additional or changing needs, how to best provide service and support, and how to reward and express appreciation to the organization's best customers.
Industry-Specific Functionality
Regardless of the amount of pre-built functionality a CRM application offers, enterprises typically develop supplemental functionality so that their CRM solution fits their unique business processes and needs. The degree to which they must do so, however, depends largely on the number of unique requirements they have and the amount of pre-built functionality an application offers. Accordingly, organizations should select applications that offer extensive pre-built functionality to support the business processes for their particular industry. By scrutinizing the pre-built functionality available in a vendor's offering, organizations can avoid needless costs associated with reinventing the wheel.
Scalability and Global Support
Many employees throughout an organization, including personnel in sales, marketing, customer service, and back-office functions, use CRM applications. In addition, increasingly large numbers of customers interact with these applications through online self-service channels. And, in the case of employee relationship management applications, the user base might include every member of the workforce. CRM applications, therefore, must be highly scalable and flexible enough to be delivered any way users prefer-in both hosted and on-premise versions, or in any combination.
In addition to scalability, CRM applications must also provide multilingual, multi-currency support as well as support for multiple time zones. With this support, global organizations can implement the applications in multiple languages while maintaining a single, unified repository of customer data across the different languages. This allows organizations, for example, to consolidate sales forecasting information across different global regions and to analyze data regardless of the language of the underlying customer interactions.
Flexible Deployment Options
Companies of all sizes utilize CRM technology to better meet the needs of their customers. As CRM initiatives expand across regions, functions, channels and markets, CRM vendors have introduced a variety of deployment options including web hosted, private hosted, on premise and combinations thereof. The selection of the correct deployment option is critical to the success of CRM within an organization. The table below provides some key insights to consider when selecting a deployment option including functionality, deployment time frame, available IT resources, budget and attitudes toward outsourcing.
Support for All Devices
Today's organizations take advantage of a broad range of information and communications devices, including desktop PCs, laptops, hand-held devices, and cell phones. A state-of-the-art CRM system must support all of these devices, whatever the underlying hardware and operating systems, and must work seamlessly across devices. For example, users of mobile devices (such as laptops and hand-held computers must be able to easily and effectively synchronize information stored locally on their device with the system's centralized database. Without this capability, mobile personnel will be out of sync with the rest of the organization, a situation that can significantly undermine sales effectiveness.
