Wednesday 21 September 2011

Content Is King, Long Live Your Intellectual Property!

They say that 80% of a company's intellectual property lies in the heads of it's employees.


The poem "There Is No Indispensable Man" carries true for an individual and an organisation, but the hole in the bucket of water will take time to go away in an organisation when a departing employees knowledge about your customers has not been captured in the CRM system.


Don't think of CRM as Customer Relationship Management, think of the acronym as Customer Relationship Matters and from a management ethos perspective think of CRM as Customer Relationships Matter.  From those two perspectives you will be able to determine how to manage your customer relationships.

In a competitive landscape, the long term key to competitive advantage is being able to add value to the relationship.  Price is a short term advantage, and many customers define the relationship with their supplier as a key differentiator over price alone.

The cost of managing customer relationships then is a key management metric, who are your profitable customers? What is costing us money? How responsive are we? and numerous other facets of a company's approach to its business that determines a customers perception of the value it gets from its suppliers.

In a CRM system then, you need to configure relevant fields to capture vital information about your customers and how you service them.  On account records you can add custom fields to track your customers social media communications (Salesforce.com have just made this native to their platform), giving you a real time feed on their activities.  News links also give you an insight to their public relations activities and news that has been written about the company.

Getting this level of information is a balancing act in making sure relevant information is input into the CRM system and validation can be a good way to achieve that, and not creating a CRM mill stone that demotivates users to the point that they avoid using the system.

Validation is a method by which fields are evaluated, and if they do not meet the validation criteria the user is prompted with an error message preventing them from saving the record until the field is updated.  By explaining the purpose of certain features and requirements in the system to users, adoption rates will not be affected and the value of the information will increase.

Make your CRM system user friendly, that acts as a productivity tool for individuals and a valuable business tool by which you can manage your business efficiently and effectively.
Get the balance right and you will be automatically guided by real-time information in making sound decisions to grow your business.

Look at your CRM system today and ask yourself how effectively you can manage your business with the information at hand.

Monday 12 September 2011

One Systems Inadequacy Can Be Another Systems Downfall

In my last blog about how clean is your data, I gave you tips about how to structure and maintain your data.

Following a recent project, I thought it would be beneficial to identify pitfalls of poor data entry, or 'short cutting' another systems inadequacies to get data entered rather than  get the problem fixed.

In this increasingly connected world, it is vitally important to create the correct data fields and to enter the accurate data, for the purpose it was created.  Users need to be aware that systems no longer work in isolation, and when a one system is not configured or designed correctly it is important NOT to find a shortcut to overcome that inadequacy. 

On this recent project, the ERP systems label printing template was not configured correctly and the contact name was not included in the label template.  So, rather than get the template fixed users had established a bad practice of entering the contact details onto the first address line of the shipping address.  The problem was fixed, in isolation.  When we then came to use the ERP shipping address information in the CRM system, the marketing and management team complained the data was corrupt as contact information was appearing in the address fields.  Subsequently, the marketing team cannot use the shipping address information for direct marketing without cleansing the data with great difficulty.  Because the contact information is variable, it cannot be deleted by a simple 'find and replace' formula.

It is only as a result of integrating the ERP data with the CRM solution, that the finance team have been made aware of the data quality issue and have quickly fixed the ERP label printing template.  However, they now have a slow ardous process of cleansing the ERP shipping data, as each ERP address is used again and manually cleansing the offending contact data.  Meanwhile, the marketing team are unable to exploit the data for use in their direct mail campaigns.

So, if you are wishing to integrate your systems to improve your organisations productivity and efficiency, look at how your data needs to interact and work on cleansing any data before you integrate.  To fail to do so could delay or even stall your integration project.  From a management perspective this is easily identified through a quick export report of the system data to be used.  In an instant you will have a perspective of the potential challenge ahead.