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| Is CRM a silver bullet or Russian roulette? |
September 3, 2002 |
By Mark Stuyt
Imagine you’ve just been anointed executive sponsor to a business initiative that is typically responsible for derailing more careers than the Enron inquisition. Your project will require you to question and challenge your organization’s core business rules, rewrite a number of its critical business processes and radically alter its culture.
The initiative has the potential to disrupt the balance of executive power, consume organizational resources at an unquenchable rate and burn through cash faster than Imelda Marcos at a Nieman Marcus shoe sale. You will be asked to satisfy hastily set and thoroughly unrealistic expectations regarding your project’s ability to increase profitability, enhance customer loyalty and bridge the chasm separating the IT and business communities.
SOUND DAUNTING? WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF CUSTOMER relationship management ( CRM). How you manage the challenge will determine whether your first post-project objective will involve ordering new furniture for the corner office or logging onto Monster.ca to find employment opportunities in Prince Albert, Sask. Trust me, I’ve survived the collateral damage that occurs when new expectations are heaped on existing projects.
Avoiding project disaster requires the vision of a druid, the tenacity of a pit bull and the patience of a weed-puller.
These attributes, combined with a pragmatic disposition, a dose of blind luck and the following insights should see you through to success.
First and foremost, align your initiative with your company’s strategic corporate goals. If your CRM project cannot significantly contribute to at least one of your CEO’s top three business challenges, cut bait. Full stop.
Project over. Also, if your project lacks Clevel support or is predicated on a business case littered with nebulous customer-centric statements, you will find your funding cut, your project shunned, your staff reassigned and your parking spot ceded to the Western University MBA grad hired to clean up your mess.
Adhering to the following advice will spare you much suffering:
Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and success metrics that support your company’s strategic objectives, then limit your phase one development to functionality that supports these metrics. If it can’t be measured it doesn’t belong in this phase.
Resist tantalizing technology, as you will likely implement less than 20 per cent of the solution’s capabilities.Keep your projects simple and practical.
Do not allow your IT organization to run this project. CRM is a business initiative, not a technology project. Few IT organizations are equipped or empowered to enable significant business or cultural change. While IT participation is critical, its stewardship is the kiss of death and you will be left with its lipstick on your cheek.
Too often, organizations buy into the “boil-the-ocean” approach to CRM often evangelized by software vendors and management consultants. While a handful of commercial software solutions can provide the functionality required for an enterprise-wide CRM transformation, few companies have the culture to support it, or the executive desire to enforce it.
Spend less time on product selection and more time on change management; less time with consultants and more time with customers; less time building the perfect business case and more time examining your business processes. CRM initiatives can revise and replace ineffective customer management strategies and dysfunctional business processes or they can propel your career into the executive management equivalent of Siberian gulags.With 55 per cent of CRM initiatives failing to deliver (Gartner Group), and the average cost of a CRM implementation running from US$60 million to US$130 million (Forrester Research), proper business alignment and project clarity are critical to success. Believe me, your career depends upon it.
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