Article: Practical advice for successful CRM

1. Know what you want
First and foremost, it’s important to analyse your business and identify your business goals before looking at which CRM package might suit your needs. What are you trying to achieve – improved customer acquisition, greater customer retention, a more cost-efficient service operation, or a combination of several goals? If so, how do you prioritise them?

2. Get high-level support
With this focus on the needs of your business comes the second vital step: getting the right support from senior management. Most CRM projects fail not because of the technology, but because of cultural problems with the implementation. In other words, because the new system isn’t designed around the needs of the people who’ll use it, or because the users don’t have an incentive to change the way they work in the new CRM-enabled business.

Your project must have support from the top of the business. You should use this support to engage with everyone who’ll be impacted by the implementation, to understand their needs, and to drive the changes that will inevitably come.

3. Outline the functionality you need
Next, you can start thinking about functionality – which areas are crucial, and which may provide benefits later in the project. Having a vision for the breadth of your eventual CRM functionality is an important step in moving forward, and the key is to identify incremental benefits that add value as your project matures. Some important areas to consider include:

Multichannel capabilities

• Your customers act in a multichannel way, even if your business doesn’t. Can your CRM system handle inbound and outbound contact by phone, the web and email?
• What about other channels, such as SMS or face-to-face contact over a trade counter?
• Will your customer-facing staff be able to see and act on a complete customer history, across every channel?
• Does your system integrate email, SMS, telephone and other communication channels with key processes throughout the customer lifecycle – during marketing, sales, fulfilment and support?

Collecting and accessing customer data

• What data do you have at the moment: how will this be imported into your new CRM system?
• What data do you want to collect, going forward? Is this a decision you have to make now, or is the system flexible enough to adapt the database in future – if, for example, you expand into new sales channels?
• How will your customer-facing personnel access that data, and does that match the reality of their day-to-day job? For example, does a proposed CRM system let your operators search on any fragment of a customer record and bring up details in a second or two, while a customer is on the phone?

Managing marketing campaigns

• Your CRM system plays a vital role in enabling you to design, launch and measure campaigns to capitalise on market opportunities. How quickly can you pull together the customer data you need to build mailing or call lists?
• Does your CRM system make it easy to run email marketing campaigns for multiple brands? Can you run campaigns across multiple channels at the same time?
• Does the system make it easy for your operators to work on multiple campaigns at once?

Data mining and analytics

• Intelligence is a vital part of CRM. It’s not just a case of sending this year’s catalogue to last year’s customers. Does your system provide tools to analyse and segment your customer base to generate new opportunities for sales, and improved service?
• Does it let you spot problems outside your business – in the supply chain, for example?
• Is it easy enough to use for domain experts, rather than relying on IT specialists to generate reports – for example, with simple graphical analysis?

Customer service

• Providing great customer service isn’t just restricted to sales, or after-sales support. Does your CRM system give a single, consistent view of the customer for all customer-facing personnel?
• Does it include workflow functions to ensure no step in the process is missed – whether it’s taking customer details for the first time, making a sale, or dealing with returns?
• If you make use of temporary workers during peak season, is the system intuitive enough to pick up and learn in a short space of time?

Building customer loyalty

• Does your CRM system let you manage customer loyalty schemes? Can you link these into sales, marketing and service processes?
• Does it give you the right loyalty options – sale prices, discounts, vouchers, bonus points and more?

Sales force automation

• Increasing sales is an obvious CRM goal. So does your system make it easy for operators to go through the process in a slick, professional way?
• Can you customise your sales screens to suit the needs of your workers, and your customers?

4. Decide how you’ll measure your success
Finally, how will you measure the success of your CRM solution? It’s often said that it costs up to eight times more to sell to a prospect than a customer, so cost of sales is an obvious CRM metric. Other tangible benefits are likely to include an increase in up-selling, repeat business, improved ROI on marketing campaigns and reduced support costs.

However, there are other areas more difficult to measure, such as customer satisfaction or employee satisfaction. ‘Soft’ metrics such as surveys can help here – and whatever you do, don’t overlook the employee angle. If CRM is new to your business there will be a significant impact on your sales and service teams, so it’s vital to listen to and act on their feedback throughout the implementation, as well as listening to your customers.

About the author:
Rick Medford is Director of Professional Services at Maginus, a leading provider of integrated sales, CRM, logistics and fulfilment solutions for the retail and distribution sector. Rick has extensive experience of real-world CRM implementations at Marks & Spencer and other leading retail and direct marketing companies.