Managing Your CRM Project
These days it’s practically routine to pick up an industry trade magazine featuring a CRM case study on page 1. Somewhere amidst the paragraph about the company’s new customer loyalty program and the part about sales uplift increasing 200 percent, you’ll find a sentence or two describing implementation.
No, CRM development isn’t sexy, and yes, it’s fraught with hazards from technology glitches to hiring freezes, but it’s the hub in the CRM wheel when it comes to ensuring a smooth rollout. The snazziest end-user interface and most enthusiastic marketing staff will never compensate for the CRM system that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Not to put too fine a point on it, the implementation project is a critical piece of the CRM puzzle.
A Pre-Implementation Checklist
I spend most of my time these days evaluating how prepared companies are to launch their CRM programs, be they departmental or enterprise-wide, single or multifunction. Sometimes this occurs at the requirements definition stage, where there is uncertainty about the perceived need and its implementation viability. Other times it involves evaluating a company’s existing infrastructure just prior to implementation. What I do most is quiz key CRM stakeholders about their existing environment from both business and technology perspectives.
My company calls such evaluations CRM Readiness Assessment engagements, but I like to consider them “premortems.” After all, what’s more valuable than fixing problems before they occur? The best way to do this is to envision possible outcomes based on current circumstances, using experiences gleaned from successful CRM deployments. It’s good old risk management, come home to roost.
Table 9-1 lists a series of considerations to be aware of before moving forward with CRM development. Make sure each of these items has been at least considered at your company, and the more complex your intended CRM program, per Table 9-1, the more mandatory it is that you resolve the issue prior to beginning development.
|
Evaluation Question |
Explanation |
Considered? |
|
Have you prepared a CRM
business plan? |
We
discussed CRM business planning in Chapter 7. Regardless of whether
management requires such a document, it’s a very good idea to have one that
represents CRM’s baseline. |
ü |
|
Do
you know who your executive sponsor is and what she expects? |
By
the time you’re ready to launch development, the CRM executive sponsor
should be crystal clear. Moreover, her role in defining and validating
requirements, managing executive expectations, and helping define success
metrics should be well understood by all stakeholders. |
|
|
Have high-level business requirements been defined? |
In
CRM this activity should be separate from the formal development project for
two reasons: business requirements will dictate whether the CRM program
moves forward and they require involvement from stakeholders who might not
be available during implementation. |
|
|
Have success metrics been established? |
How will you know if your CRM program has been a success? Although many
companies don’t require success metrics—like those we discussed in Chapter
7— to be implemented, they’re an effective safety net for after the system
is deployed. |
|
|
Has the project been
funded? |
No
use planning an entire CRM program if only a mere proof-of-concept has been
approved. |
|
|
Is there agreement on
desired customer behaviors? Are the business functions slated to support
these desired behaviors apparent? |
Depending on the scope of your CRM program, you might include a description
of desired customer behavior in your CRM business plan. Either way, building
consensus on how you want customers to behave differently is important. For
instance, if sales staff will be using CRM to manage the sales pipeline, it
should establish the ideal response to an information mailing. |
|
|
Does each organization
agree on a common definition of “customer”? |
The marketing department of an automobile company might consider a
“customer” to be a dealer, but the call center might consider it to be a
driver. Have consensus on this and other key definitions before you begin. |
|
|
Can you map the desired
functionality to data requirements? |
Customer data is
complex more often than it’s straightforward. This usually means defining
data requirements along with business requirements. At some point you’ll
need to know whether customer data is necessary and from what system it will
originate. A firm understanding of the level of customer data—account,
household1 [1] —is also critical. |
|
|
Do you suspect that
external data will be necessary? |
Purchasing data from an
external source such as Dun & Bradstreet, Axciom, Data Quick, or Experian
might not initially be a high priority, but it can supplement customer
profiles with such indicators as number of family members, estimated income,
household-level psychographics, ZIP code breakdowns, real estate
information, and other attributes that can reveal customer behaviors and
preferences. |
|
|
For customization, does
the current workstation development environment support the CRM product? |
What type of
workstation configurations does your CRM tool’s development environment
require? Additional development tools (e.g., Microsoft’s Visual Studio) or
hardware (e.g., database servers) might be necessary to correctly customize
the CRM environment. |
|
|
Have you identified the
other applications or systems with which the CRM project must integrate? |
There should be an
up-front understanding of the impact of CRM on other corporate systems and
of how the data will move between systems effectively. I addition, staff
members whose systems will be touched by CRM should be notified of the
pending integration requirements. |
|
|
Have the organizational
or political barriers to rolling out CRM have been identified? Have they
been resolved? |
Yes, it’s a loaded
question. (See the end of this chapter.) No, it’s not meant to point
fingers, but to establish up-front what the tactics will be when questions
of ownership or disagreements about functional priorities rear their heads.
An influential executive sponsor might be able to resolve such issues before
they arise. |
|
|
Have you truly defined
your privacy policy? |
Regardless of whether your CRM program will be Web-based, understand your
company’s boundaries for using data about your customers. CRM must not only
adhere to a corporate privacy policy; it should also be the flagship example
of the company’s behavior around customer data. See Chapter 10 for more
about handling privacy. |
|
Table 9-1 CRM Pre-Implementation Checklist
[1] The practice of “householding” organizes individual consumers into the households in which they live. Although the term normally applies to the residential market, business householding groups various organizations of a business customer into a common hierarchy. The challenge of householding is getting everyone to agree on the definition of a household.
The most valuable feature of a “premortem” exercise is that it’s a lot easier to give bad news before disaster strikes than to say “I told you so” after the fact—and after the money has been spent. CRM assessment findings can alert the business sponsor to potential roadblocks. Such findings allow CRM team members to fix problems proactively rather than pointing fingers after the CRM project has failed, as 70 percent of all CRM projects allegedly do.
Ideally, the answer to each of the above questions will be “yes,” with consensus on how each issue will be handled when it’s encountered. At the very least, the CRM team should be aware of each issue and prepared to deal with it when it inevitably comes up.
The CRM Development Team
CRM is big. It has captured the attention and imagination of corporate executives.Marketing VPs are betting their jobs on it, CIOs are asking their staffs to formulate CRM policies, and CEOs are creating job roles such as “Chief Customer Officer” that not only embrace CRM but depend on it.
Hopefully by now your company has adopted a customer-focused strategy and is putting in place the inevitable customer-focused programs and accompanying organizations. This often means organizational change: product managers have become “segment managers,” spearheading customer segments irrespective of the products and services within them, and CSR job definitions are being continually modified as companies better understand customer channel usage and interaction preferences.
In addition to the broader organizational and cultural changes that accompany an evolving customer focus, CRM calls for specific implementation roles and responsibilities. In many cases, these job roles are new; in others, existing functions play key parts in CRM development.
Table 9-2 lists the core job functions within a CRM development team. Make sure you’ve accounted for each of these roles before embarking on a development project, and understand the skills from both inside and outside the company might be necessary to fill these positions.
|
Job Role |
Description |
|
Business Sponsor: |
The business sponsor might serve across a single CRM project
or across the entire program. His main role is to establish the vision,
articulate overall goals and objectives, set the tone for the project team,
and serve as a tiebreaker for implementation issues. The business sponsor
often funds the initial CRM application. The more departments CRM spans, the
greater the level of authority the sponsor should have. |
|
CRM Steering Committee: |
For cross-functional or enterprise CRM initiatives where
implementation must be prioritized, a committee of decision-makers familiar
with the "pain points" CRM can address should convene on a regular basis to
provide new requirements, prioritize proposed improvements, and communicate
key corporate initiatives. |
|
Implementation Project Manager: |
This person’s job is to ensure that the requirements defined
by the business sponsor and steering committee dictate the functionality to
be implemented. The implementation project manager oversees the day-to-day
implementation activities, tracks status, and updates the business sponsor
on current issues. |
|
Lead Developer: |
The lead developer should manage the technical development
and customization of the CRM product as it relates to the requirements. She
should participate in CRM technology selection (see Chapter 8) and hire the
appropriate developers to implement the CRM toolset. |
|
Database Developer (and team): |
The database developer should lead the necessary data
integration, regardless of whether it is operational or analytical CRM.
Often this means working with the company’s data warehouse and its
development team. In other cases, an understanding of key company source
systems and how to capture their data is mandatory, requiring a separate
team of database administrators and data "extraction" experts. |
|
Front-end Developer (and team): |
Depending on the chosen CRM product, programming is needed
to develop or customize the end-user interface. |
|
Subject matter experts (SMEs): |
Critical to CRM success are subject matter experts—usually
businesspeople from the department slated to use the CRM system after it’s
in production (for instance, a CSR or a sales manager). SMEs usually have
strong ideas of what CRM should and shouldn’t provide and should participate
regularly in the development and testing of a CRM product. |
Table 9-2 Core CRM Development Roles
|
