The Right Way to Select CRM Technology
I recently received an e-mail from a client with whom I hadn’t worked in several years. This client (let’s call him Bill) asked me to review his organization’s CRM technology strategy. Bill, the chief architect at a large utility in California, said in his note that while they would not replace their existing customer databases (very expensive CIS systems), they would be evaluating new user-facing applications. Bill mentioned two popular customer service applications and asked which one I’d recommend for his organization. After convincing myself that this must be a trick question – anyone who’s ever worked with me knows I don’t buy into the “because they’re household names one must be right for you” game – I called Bill and asked (nicely, I swear) if he’d forgotten everything I’d ever taught him. Turns out that no, he hadn’t forgotten completely, he just needed a little “reminder” about the right way to provision CRM technology. Where “reminder” equals a stern but loving lecture…
As I reminded Bill, I recommend a process which, when consistently applied, forces CRM teams to think beyond project based requirements to patterns and best practices that run through several individual technology decisions. Because it is still not possible to purchase all CRM technology ecosystem components (i.e., operational, collaborative and analytical CRM) from a single vendor in all industries, organizations will frequently repeat the provisioning process. It is therefore critical that organizations evolve to a process-oriented technology acquisition strategy whereby an organization’s customer strategy drives CRM technology decisions. This approach is in direct contrast to the more common approaches of issuing project-specific RFPs, product evaluations, and market segmentations which are snapshots of a point in time.
The CRM Technology Provisioning Process - The provisioning process consists of four discrete steps, with the deliverables of the process satisfying one of the four key enterprise architecture components.
The first stage of this process, Needs Analysis, involves the identification of CRM business needs based on process and/or customer patterns. Customer patterns (CRM treatments. applied to individual customer segments) are based on unique segment characteristics (e.g., channel and touch point preferences, path through the engage-transact-fulfill-service customer life cycle) and are used when common/repeatable attributes of the customer base are known. Generic process patterns (based on the ETFS [engage, transact, fulfill, service] path and identification of process breakdowns in sales, marketing, or service) are used when customer patterns are not known. The output of needs analysis is a list of prioritized current and future business needs to support the organization’s strategic CRM objectives. In Bill's case, his company focused on the service process, as that is the source of most of its customer information. He discovered three overarching business needs: providing a single view of the customer for service representatives and others in contact with customers, improving the customer experience, and improving marketing capabilities.
The next stage in this process is Requirements Definition, which decomposes the needs identified in the previous stage into requisite business and infrastructure services to support those needs. Business services include higher-level discrete business functions across the operational, analytical, and collaborative CRM domains. Infrastructure services encompass both application services (e.g., development, foundation, administration, integration) and specific services to support the higher-level business services. The output of requirements definition is a prioritized list of services necessary to satisfy the needs identified in the first stage. Like Bill, most organizations selecting technology confuse requirements and needs and essentially skip directly to this stage. I’m sure you do this too – talk about gathering “the requirements” for the solution. And yes, often these include process requirements. However when the business needs as discussed above have not been identified, you introduce a huge amount of risk into the selection. Bill's needs turned into a requirement definition that included customer segmentation and real-time marketing.
Gap Analysis, the third stage in the CRM technology provisioning process, involves mapping the business and infrastructure services identified in the previous stage to services that already exist within the organization (i.e., existing inventory). As the name of this stage implies, the objective is to identify where the gaps exist between the CRM current and future state. The output of gap analysis is a prioritized shopping list of business services (and therefore, requisite application and infrastructure services). This stage also reveals which technology components currently in inventory need to be updated to support the CRM future state. Tactical fixes to the current state (“low-hanging fruit”) are also revealed during this stage. Bill discovered fairly significant gaps around operational services for marketing and analytical services enabling customer behavior modeling and scoring. These types of services had not even been on the radar screen prior to this activity.
The final stage of this process, Product Evaluation, involves mapping the prioritized shopping list identified in the previous stage to commercially available CRM applications (or, conversely, to be used as a basis for developing CRM componentry in-house, though this is counter to best practice). The outputs of product evaluation are technology patterns needed to support discrete customer or process patterns identified in the first stage. In turn, these technology patterns consist of vendor products and/or in-house development requirements. Bill found that while they certainly needed to refresh the customer service agent’s desktop with a more usable UI, they also needed to source a marketing application and other data aggregation technologies.
Applying the Process - While the details of this process (not the process itself) will differ significantly from organization to organization (based on factors such as CRM readiness, infrastructure maturity, existing CRM application portfolio), users must understand the process itself is highly iterative. In other words, the majority of organizations will need to go through this process a number of times, each time refining and achieving increased granularity with respect to customer patterns and, therefore, technology patterns. Ultimately, this process will enable organizations to more readily evolve to a lifecycle approach to CRM, while providing highly specialized treatments to specific customer patterns. So what did Bill ultimately do? After applying this process a few times, he ultimately settled on a combination of packaged customer service software (though not either of the original two about which he had e-mailed me) with a combination of purchased and custom-developed add-on services for the marketing. Not a bad outcome.
Recent Comments