The CRM platforms are not new. They exist in the market from a lot years ago, but not all the companies were success in this pitch. Some companies invest huge amount of money in big deployment projects with no results or giving up the project before the final go live. There are some main concepts to have in mind in order to be success:
–Strategy and commit: the CRM is not only software; it is a company strategy or a corporate mode to work with the customers. If we want to be success with the CRM, senior management must be committed. The CRM platform should be the unique point of customer information, and all the teams should share and retrieve customer info from this data warehouse. This is very important for the Customer experience point of view, if we want to have a real relationship with customers, and not only get business transactions.
– Innovation (Technology and processes): The software package or technology is also very important, but we should bear in mind, that platform support business process, so these are the core piece. Each company if different from each other, and they would have different ways to run the business, so process would be different as well. First step is to have a clear picture of these workflows and redefine them in order to improve them. Software evaluation has to have in mind the processes map, and the platform roadmap. There are a lot of CRM providers, some of them have similar capabilities, but these differences will make. Innovation is a very important piece of this game, as we, as CRM experience responsible, should provide the best and more accurate way to have this customer relationship. Innovation use to be link with latest technology and gadget, but should be also related with improvement, making customer and corporate life easier.
–Data drive: all business info is stored in different databases, displayed in CRM platform using some devices (laptops, tablets, Smartphone…) but info should some characteristics. This information should drive our business decisions and actions (segmentations, campaigns, ..) so we have to work (in order to get the maximum ROI) with more update info, representing the customer or client, it should be as much accurate as possible and it has to be unique (not different information in different systems). Some data quality and clean up frequently actions should be set up in order to ensure stated characteristics and performing data enrichment if needed.
–Business: It is important don’t forget we are trying to help business growth and customer loyalty. So CRM philosophy and information should be involved in each needed area or team, having a multi-channel presence. Depending our corporate nature we should be focus on B2B or B2C activities, and also integrated into e-commerce. CRM teams stakeholders are diverse as IT teams, Marketing, Sales, Business units,… So have in mind the big whole corporate picture, acting in the end to end customer lifecycle.
The latest CRM providers ensure easy and fast connexions with other corporate systems as ERP, customer portals, logistic systems… In fact some custom developments are possible for better integration within the company. This is the first step for the real CRM integration and involvement into the entire company process with a company customer based activities.
