As reported in yet another survey by two industry research firms Gartner and META, anywhere from 50 to 80 per cent of CRM implementations have not met corporate expectations. Failure to meet expectations affects corporate views of CRM from top to bottom.
While these figure are certainly discouraging for proponents of CRM, if you define CRM in its true context – business processes focused on enhancing user relationships, rather than enterprise-wide complex software systems – then these figures take on lesser importance.
CRM No Panacea
What has really been happening is that the promise of some grand technological panacea for managing relationships between businesses and their customers – or between public sector organizations and their constituents -- is not being realized.
Many organizations in search of the ‘silver bullet’ CRM solution overlook the hard reality that customer-level objectives cannot be obtained through technology alone. Broken organizational processes not oriented around the customer experience will surely result in CRM tools and software implementations that are almost guaranteed to fail (see CRM Means Understanding Customers).
Tool-focused CRM has proved untenable, so what’s the best approach? Unfortunately, many CRM solutions focus on customer avoidance rather than the integration and migration of communication channels. How this approach can improve customer relations is a mystery!
It should be obvious that avoiding transactions with customers is not the road to establishing good customer relations…for end users, there is one channel – they have a need, and corporations need to meet it, or else. There are refinements to CRM which can contribute to its success and avoid the pitfalls which plague some implementtions.
Is CIM the New CRM?
One approach to customer relationships, a refinement of CRM which is finding favor in some management circles, is a concept called customer interaction management or CIM.
CIM creates an end-to-end customer perspective covering all points of contact -- phone, e-mail, chat and web – to advance a positive customer experience.
Properly planned and deployed, CIM, an extension of CRM, can become a customer-centered, process-oriented way to reduce costs, save money, increase revenues and create happier, more loyal customers.
Transforming a Business to CIM
The key steps to transforming a business through a CIM approach are the following:
- Identify customer-level objectives
- Eliminate silos of information
- Analyze current business processes and workflows
- Align channels and service models
- Create a transition plan and an interactive approach to customer relationships
Taking these steps requires answers to the following questions:
1. How does your organization do business today?
2. Who are the customers moving through your transaction processes?
3. How is each interaction channel currently used?
4. What are channel capabilities and costs?
Making CRM Work
Common tasks can be associated and linked with the preferred channel and related environments for each user type. Fill the gaps: including service levels within certain channels, and creating incentives for one segment of users to move from an inefficient or poor performing channel to another.
Institute a policy for handling exceptions and offer realistic flexibility to customers. A customer’s worst nightmare can be trying to solve a problem online and then having a troubleshooting effort de-railed over the phone.
Start to move users from one channel to another, or shift agent roles to other customer support staff to optimize the customer experience. Design a plan and measurement tool for a continuous improvement process. Integrate existing systems and add capabilities incrementally to make a smooth transition to interactive processes.
Important business analysis processes should be used to track and report business activities to help make better business decisions, monitor user acceptance, track customer satisfaction and the effectiveness of various channels, as well as the ROI for each customer interaction.
Duane Sharp - I am a retired professional engineer (electronics), with over 40 years of writing experience in technology topics, with a focus on the IT ...
