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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Content Management Systems are a great way to maintain the integrity of your web site by allowing you, not a web designer, to have control of your content. When you look for a CMS, look for one that is designed to provide a user-friendly environment that can accommodate multiple users with varying skill levels. Some CMS systems are designed as software that installs on your servers or your PC, while other CMS’s are hosted by the system’s developers and accessed over the Internet via a browser. This type of CMS is generally less expensive than those installed on your server. Not only will they be less expensive in most cases…you should shop around…but many are supplied as “software-on-demand” and are priced per session. That means you only pay when you use it.

Editor’s Note: see CMS hosting for screenshots and overview of ServiceCycle CMS

Another thing you should look for is the features of the CMS. It should have all the features of MS Word and be so simple to use that your content developers will be able to begin creating and editing content with ease. CMS systems come in multiple flavors and can be deployed for both small and large companies.

Many of the better-designed CMS’s are based on authentication level, which means that content developers are granted permission to access the authorized areas within the system. This permission-based content access management utility is very popular and is designed and developed for creating, accessing, and managing menus, submenus, hyperlinks, new page creations, etc. It should offer authorized content developers the ability to navigate quickly and intuitively, using pull-down and drill-down menus to get to specific areas of your web site. Most CMS’s have an auto-log-out procedure that can be implemented if a content editor leaves an active session open without making any changes for a certain predetermined length of time. In such cases all unsaved work should be queued for immediate review once the content developer logs back in.

Find a CMS that is designed with no restrictions on page lengths and quantity of content, and allows your content developers to preview new or changed content easily. Users should be able to make multiple content changes that will be made immediately without extensive wait or reload time.

Pictures and images are extremely important for some companies web sites. They may need to upload new photos often, or remove them when they are obsolite. Therefore you need to find out if that option for your photos is avaialbe in the sytem you choose. An important question to ask is, how much control will you have of where and how your pictures appear within the layout of your web pages? This may seem like a very simple question, but you would be surprised how many people do not ask it. Another question is, how easy are the tools within the CMS to use and how much training, if any, and support you will get from the CMS’s developer?

Your web site is a critical connection between your company and your customers/visitors. Keeping your content up-to-date can be the most effective way to sell your products and services and ensure that your web site works for you, not against you.

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Customer relationship management (CRM) is a concept for increasing companies’ profitability by enabling them to identify and concentrate on their profitable customers. The term “electronic commerce customer relationship management” (ECCRM) refers to the application of CRM in electronic commerce, i.e., when business relationships are maintained via the Internet or World Wide Web. Previous studies on the effectiveness of ECCRM have often focused on the process level, technical aspects, or on marketing issues. Yet only little evidence has been reported for the impact of ECCRM on the company level. In this chapter we present the results from a large-scale empirical study investigating the impact of ECCRM on corporate success in electronic commerce. The study comprises 469 cases of general companies in the German-speaking market. We find that ECCRM is a critical success factor in electronic commerce, independent of companies’ time on the Web. It is especially critical for B2C and small companies.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategic concept enabling companies to systematically build up and extend the knowledge of their customers, thus empowering companies to actively conduct, ie, manage, the business relationships with their customers. CRM can be understood as a revolving process during which companies interact with their customers, thereby generating, aggregating, and analyzing customer data obtained from all channels, and employing the results for service and marketing activities.

Companies may pursue several goals when employing CRM to manage their customer relationships. An economic goal which companies seek to achieve by the use of CRM is to increase profitability by concentrating on the economically valuable customers, thus increasing revenue (“share of wallet”) from them, while possibly “de-marketing” and discontinuing the business relationship with non-profitable customers. Strategic considerations represent another motivation for companies to employ CRM: By providing customized products and services to them, companies can increase their customer satisfaction, which is likely to lead to higher customer loyalty and longer customer retention. This, in turn, makes it less probable that their customers will defect to other companies (i.e., it lowers the churn rate).
Electronic commerce customer relationship management or ECCRM strongly relies on Internet or Web-based interaction of companies with their customers, yet also includes customer data obtained through the other channels. As the term suggests, ECCRM is a key element of CRM by specifically aiming at supporting electronic commerce, which we understand as the activities related to initiating, negotiating, and executing business transactions online. Since the beginning of the commercial use of the Web, ECCRM has received increasing attention from both practitioners and researchers.

In order to enable the revolving (EC)CRM process, a number of instruments must be implemented. They comprise a technical infrastructure as a base, as well as a number of business processes conducted on top. The instruments can be grouped into the following categories, each representing a step in the revolving process:

1. Data Collection. To generate customer information, customer data should first be collected across all available channels. In electronic commerce, these are typically a company’s website, but also email, interaction with the (Web) call center, and the offline channels. Customer data can be collected either actively, i.e., with the knowledge of the customers, e.g., through interactive questionnaires on the Web, or passively, i.e., without the knowledge of the customers, e.g., through clickstream analyses or by otherwise logging customers’ surfing behavior while on the company’s website. Correspondingly, the type of the data collected may range from personal information, preferences, or purchase histories, to rather intimate behavioral data which the customers themselves might even be unconscious of.
2. Data Aggregation. In this step, customer data is first pooled from all sources (channels) and then “distilled” (i.e., concentrated) to customer information. Depending on the industry and customer type, a considerable amount of business intelligence is necessary in order to recognize certain patterns within the customer information, i.e., typical profiles. While collecting all kinds of customer data may be relatively simple, condensing it and making proper sense of it, i.e., as the final consequence, drawing the right conclusion with respect to the profitability of a customer, is a lot more difficult. Over the Internet and World Wide Web, most competitors in a market (segment) may have access to the same customer base, especially as search and switching costs tend to be very low. Therefore it is the quality of customer information and its evaluation with which companies can secure their competitive advantage.
3. Customer Interaction. With this step, one cycle of the revolving ECCRM process is closed. Companies can react to their customers based on the customer information they have. They can provide positive feedback to, i.e., actively market to their customers, thus intensifying the revolving ECCRM process, or they can provide negative feedback to their customers, i.e., de-market and terminate the business relationship with them.

The central message is that a skill set based on accumulating and exploiting customer knowledge, which we term companies’ ECCRM-capability, is a key success factor in electronic commerce. Yet for the time being, it must be left up to every company to decide how they can attain a sufficient level of ECCRM-capability. While some companies may have already built up their ECCRM-capability through their regular business processes, others might require the implementation of an ECCRM system. Original Article Source

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When should you leverage the relationship?

Leveraging sometimes brings a negative connotation to the mix. It does not have to be that way. Leveraging with alliances can work into a win-win situation were both parties become more profitable and they form more solid business relationships. Leveraging should be taken seriously and not as a way to step on another business to make your own headway. If you work with the alliance partner, you will both be able to leverage the relationship for mutual benefit.

For example, a store I was working with in the past had several channel partners that they wanted to leverage. A meeting was setup to discuss how the relationship could be expanded so that it benefited both parties. It was discovered that the partner wanted to learn more about the products the company was selling and get more into the training aspect for its customer base. The parent company on the other hand wanted to find ways to support the customers of the partner in order for the partner to gain more sales.

In this case, both parties were able to leverage the others’ contacts and offer better customer service. The channel partners also were able to find additional customers because they had more of an inside track on the products being offered. They were able to train new customers and give a new dimension to their offerings. The parent company profited from the additional sales.

Through leveraging the current customer base and the product lines, both companies could offer better customer service. As a result of this success, the parent company offered the same alternatives to other channel partners and found that most of them welcomed the additional opportunity. The opportunity, in order to be successful, has to be presented to the right level of decision makers.

Who You Need (to Form a Relationship With)

At what level should the relationship be established?

A question that is often asked is “How do you get to the right person in an organization for making the decision?” The answer is not an easy one as some organizations have decision making at various levels, and of course it depends on the size of the organization. If you are dealing with 10 or fewer employees, you are likely to need to work with the owner or CEO of the organization. It is imperative that you do not deal with those that cannot make the appropriate decision. You may find that you are dealing with influencers, but in the long run they cannot make the decision to go or not to go with the alliance.

So how do you get to the right person? There are many answers to this question, but the simplest answer is to start at the top. I know that many CEOs do not want to deal with sales people and certainly not with a lot of the everyday information that comes their way. So getting to them may be a bit difficult. The best way to form a relationship is to appeal to their business pain (that which concerns them the most) and offer a solution to that pain. For example, a company I worked with wanted to setup a channel or partner network to sell their products, since they only had a couple of dealers at the time but needed to move to the next level. They had to deal directly with the owners of the companies and offer them a profit, as the proverbial carrot, to entice them.

Profit is not the only way to get to the CEO, you also need to understand their business goals and see how you can fit into the formula before making the approach. The key here is to show that you have something to offer that is of value to them.

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