Although I am a proponent of CRM software and database management, I have never, nor will I run across a software solution that provides Complete CRM. On a note of credibility, my company, Wright Solutions is partnered with a few CRM software providers whom will not be referenced anywhere in this post, or this series. I want you to understand the depth of my committment to the fundamentals of human CRM.

Companies in the market for CRM solutions actually are in need of better managing relationships with their customers, and most are looking at CRM applications as the answer. I am not about to suggest that any of the well designed and reliable IT solutions are not a significant piece of the puzzle. I will say that alone, they are not ‘the answer’. Three significant misconceptions continue to impede the successful implementation of CRM systems or upgrades. The first myth is that CRM is a software solution, secondly that CRM is a tactic and lastly that satisfied customers are loyal customers. The truth is that CRM is a people driven - not a software solution, CRM is a strategy not a tactic, and satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal.

Busting the myths - the 5 W’s of Customer Relations.

Myth #1. CRM is a Software Solution. Who - If you spend $25,000 on the installation and implementation of a CRM system, and six months down the road you have no increase in the number of customers regularly repeating business with you, Who is accountable? What - If your employees do not ‘buy in’ to the new system, failing to input or update customer information correctly, What results will your $25,000 investment produce? Why - Have you purchased and introduced this new software? If your answer is in any way similar to the following statement, you are guaranteeing failure: Our employees never seem to have the time, or just don’t consistently follow up with our customers. Where - Are you measuring and monitoring the results produced by your CRM software at the end of the process? If you are, how do you know the quality of the data initially input by front line staff? When - Time, a commodity always in demand, always in short supply. Two thoughts on time: If one of the reasons you made this investment was due to the fact that your employees didn’t follow up with your customers, what makes you think they’ll now have or take the time to accurately update records in the system? And have you made provisions for one or more people to have the extra time needed to monitor and review the output of the system for errors, duplications or unique circumstances?

Having put all that out on the table, I’m sure (well, actually I’m hoping) that I’ve left you with more questions. “If this great new IT solution is not the whole answer, what is?”, “I’ve already made the investment, how do I ensure its success?”, “We’ve trained and offered incentives to our employees, they claim to be following proceedures, but still our numbers haven’t gone up. What do we do now?” … The possibilities here are limitless!

From my perspective, I say GOOD! It means I’ve succeeded in reaching my goal for today. To provide food for thought, to provide incentive for you to question and examine what you are doing today and what results you are getting is a tremendous step towards a solution. Success never comes by way of quick fixes or trendy technology. You will arrive at success only once you have honestly assessed the gap and determined where you are today. If you also have a clear view of where you want to go tomorrow, we can begin to size up that gap and decide how to bridge it.

How to do that begins with the discussion of the next myth: CRM is a tactic. My next post will bust that myth in brief as we’ve done here with the first.

Over the course of this series we will be taking an honest look at where many businesses are today - The real deal, I don’t care too much for ‘political correctness’ or ‘beating around the bush’. Some may not like my approach, but those that follow me through, those that suffer the unease of examining and questioning your ‘comfort zone’ will find themselves ahead of the game and significantly improving their success.

Until next time, I implore you to change your viewpoint, get down on the ground, climb a ladder, anything to look at your business, your employees, your customers and your processes from a different perspective. I also encourage you to read. If you haven’t looked at a book on customer service since your college days, do it now. Some of my favourites are: “The Butterfly Customer: Capturing the Loyalty of Today’s Elusive Consumer”, “Customer Tells : Deliver World Class Customer Service Using Championship Poker Strategies” and “Are You Being Served Yet?: Customer Service Evolution”.

Thanks for reading. I wish you all success at learning something new today.

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According to a recent study by the Incoming Calls Management Institute, Inc. (ICMI), there are currently 50,600 Call Centers in the United States containing 2.86 million agent positions. Additionally in Canada there are approximately 4,500 Call Centers with 212,000 agent positions. In North America alone, this is in excess of 3 million agent positions with an estimated 2.4 employee shifts of operation in these centers – which is approximately 7.4 million Call and Contact Center Agents – with over 97 percent of these agents currently identified as headset users in North America. Additionally there are over 1 million agent positions overseas devoted exclusively to servicing the U.S. market.

One of the driving forces in the expansion of Call and Contact Centers worldwide is the burgeoning CRM (Customer Relationship Management) industry and its use in today’s technology-enabled corporate environments. CRM is a catch-all term that is most commonly used to describe software and related technologies that manage customer-facing business functions (most notably Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, and Support) and their related business processes and data.

The term CRM first emerged in the mid-1990s, created with the intent of describing how Sales, Marketing and Customer Service technologies needed to work not just within each department but also integrated together. Prior to the advent of CRM, some companies deployed Sales Force Automation (SFA) applications to automate the sales process and track prospect data, but that data did not usually leave the sales department. Therefore when customers called in with a problem or service need, the Customer Service department would be unaware of interactions with the Sales team. This lead to customers’ perceptions that the company was uncaring, incompetent or uncoordinated. This would often result in a frustrated customer departing for the competition.

Early customer-facing applications, SFA, telemarketing, marketing campaign management, and help desk served their individual purposes, but were unable to provide the integration that allowed companies to serve their customers with a “single face.”

CRM is neither a simple nor risk-free proposition, but not implementing CRM is also not an option. Markets continue to get more and more competitive, and the margin between success and failure grow narrow. Companies that are able to better manage customer data and customer-facing processes have a clear advantage over their competitors.

When implemented and utilized to its full potential, CRM allows companies to increase both their revenues and profits while lowering the cost of marketing, selling to and servicing their customers. The payoff is clear – by better aligning business processes and managing customer data across all customer-facing functions, companies can build successful, profitable and long-term customer relationships.

A CRM strategy is about much more than merely selecting the right technology – rather it is a business strategy that may very well necessitate that you completely reinvent how companies do business. Despite these challenges, many companies including many Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) have seen tremendous success with CRM.

Getting CRM right is about striking balance between tactically solving problems within specific areas and managing customer-facing processes and data across them. For CRM to be successful at both strategic and technological levels, it must be integrated.

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The most important single distinction we must make in our target group for any brand is the one between prospects and customers. This is because these two groups play very different roles in our business building program.

There are two broad strategic activities involved in increasing our brands’ market share. We have to keep getting more revenues. And we have to avoid losing revenues we are already getting.

We will never grow our market share if we don’t keep in-creasing our revenues. We will also never grow our market share if we keep losing more revenues than we are getting.

Each of these two strategic activities involves two functions:

There are two broad ways to keep getting more revenues:
1. We have to convert more prospects into customers.
2. We have to get our existing customers to use more of our products or services.

And there are two broad ways to avoid losing revenues we are already getting:
3. We have to avoid disappointing customers’ experience of our products or services.
4. We have to avoid disappointing customers in all the other the experiences they might associate with our brand.

Of the four strategic functions, the first, that of converting more prospects into customers, is, by far, more difficult than the other three.

This is because this function involves overcoming two major barriers:
a) prospects have little or no interest in or any relation-ship with our brand;
b) prospects are already engaged in another activity that we will have to discontinue, typically that of using our competitor’s product or services.

This is the function that focuses on our prospects, the people who possess the money that is not yet being transmuted into our revenues, and are therefore the most important target toward increasing the market share of our brand.

Prospects have to made to notice our brand, they have to be made to get interested in our brand, they have to be made to desire our brand, and they have to be made to prefer our brand over its competitors, and ultimately, of course, they have to be made to purchase our brand, which is when their money becomes our revenues, and when prospects become our customers.

The remaining three strategic functions, that of increasing customers’ usage, and avoiding disappointing them either with our products/services or in any other way, are, relatively, significantly easier. This is because all three of them involve dealing with people who, as existing customers, are already in a relationship with us. As such, these three strategic functions involve a degree of receptivity toward us from the people we are addressing. Indeed, with today’s interactive media, it has become easier for us to know them individually by name, know where they live, how to reach them, and be familiar with their demographics of gender, age, education, lifestyle, and other habits; and their psycho-graphics of values, interests and other preferences.

Coming back to the first strategic function, that of converting prospects into customers, we have literally to transform their existing disinterest toward our brand into a relationship. This toughest business challenge involves, above all, the WHAT of branding, and the HOW of MarComm, advertising, sales promotions, merchandising, pricing, distribution, packaging and other marketing and communications media and activities.

Branding is the most important of these because it is the conceptual essence of the entire business building effort. Branding comprises the cluster of concepts and signals that have the challenge of overcoming the greatest barriers between us and the prospect – those of their disinterest and pre-existing preferences and habits. The disciplines and media of sales, advertising, sales promotions, distribution, pricing, merchandising and packaging, etc. then have to deliver this brand communications essence to the prospect so that it can break through the barriers of disinterest and prior practice.

CRM, or customer relationship management should cover all the HOWs involved in maintaining and strengthening the relationship with the customer, once branding has broken through and established the relationship.

In this, CRM must remain consistent with the brand communications essence, which lives on in the customer as a cluster of expectations and signals, which is the de facto the brand. Just as the above mentioned sales, marketing and communications functions must deliver the brand through media and locations, CRM must deliver, and stay true to the brand essence through all its human and other experiential interactions with the customer.

So every element of the functioning relationship with the customer, the ease of opening the package, the ease of use of the product, the performance of the product, the disposal of the packaging, the messages received by the customer, the experiences of the customer with customer service staff, with billing staff, with credit control staff, with collections staff, with vehicles bearing our brand’s logo, all must not only avoid negative residue, but also regard themselves as brand communications as well, and deliver all these activity-media in ways that are consistent with the brand.

It must be noted that CRM can also contribute indirectly to increasing revenues and market share as well. This can be accomplished by fulfilling the brand essence vis a vis the customer so thoroughly via the latter’s experiences, that customers are delighted enough to make the effort to recommend it to other people who also happen to be prospects.

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