5 Reasons why social media should change your approach to CRM.

December 20, 2012

Customer Relationship Management has been carried out in the same way for a number of years. What’s so different about social media and why should social media change your approach to CRM?

1. You can’t “push” messages anymore

One way or another “pushing messages” within the traditional CRM approach means selling. Before social media, anyone interested in your product or service had to talk to someone in your company. This usually meant a salesperson.

With social media customers can decide when and how they want to interact with you, because there are communities of interest on line (forums) for your industry where good or bad experiences and reviews are shared, allowing people to make informed choices. You can’t readily sell to online users in the traditional way. You have to manage perceptions to create desire for people to make the effort to decide to buy from you.
This means you the marketer has to carry out activities which are not perceived as selling but “pull” believers or advocates to your product or service. These advocates then tell other people about you. It also means you need to manage some extra activities in CRM (see below).

2. Social media activity shouldn’t be owned by sales

Is social media activity “selling” as such? It’s much harder to track the success of lead generation activities when sales can’t follow up in the traditional way. It’s not about how good your sales people are it’s about how well you interact with queries.
The difference is that social media gives a potential buyer the opportunity to find out a great deal about your product, your service, and the very experience of dealing with you before the sale happens. This means it’s actually interactions with potential buyers that influence behaviours (and need to be tracked) in CRM not just sales opportunities. You then use CRM to identify which types of interaction are most likely to result in sales.
Should an on-line strategy be run by sales? It looks like a social media strategy may fit more comfortably with the PR function.

3. The customer has real time interaction with you – and everyone else

Information on the internet is available 24 hours a day, instantly. This creates an expectation of rapid response which means you are likely to need to structure your online activity to be able to respond far faster than traditional communications methods. After all, every other person on a forum could hear about perceived slow service the same day it happens. You have to interact with those communities and simply collaborate to help with their business problems, not sell.
Every area of the business which has contact with the customer or prospect has to be providing the customer experience in the same way and to a consistent high quality. It also means the metrics traditionally used in marketing may not be adequate in a world where interactions and engagements are important.

4. Online, Differentiation and Brand is everything

Guess what? Buyers have never bought solely on price. Branding is the means by which you build a perception of quality in the mind of your buyer and reduce the buyer’s dependence on price. Price is important but the commitment to you is made on the basis of a sort of perceptual bundle of goodies including how they feel about your product and service. Survey said on line 70% of the buyer’s journey is completed before they speak to a sales person (SiriusDecisions).
Online your credibility as a vendor and your brand are everything. In an environment of instant feedback having a clear message for how you are different to your competition and managing and maintaining that perception is more important than ever.

5. Social media moves the balance of power from vendor to customer.

The challenge is the customers POWER. By enabling so much more information to be gleaned without direct human interaction reduces loyalty and makes it far easier to switch vendors. The message really is that social media is here to stay and has to become part of your marketing profile. So ensure the online user has good experiences of you, be available, and use CRM to integrate your business processes so everyone can access up to date information on customers and prospects to deal with questions, challenges and opportunities effectively, as they arrive.

Summary

It would be a mistake to think social media is a black art. None of the above is fundamentally different to marketing off line, and social media is not so much totally different as more of a logical extension of traditional marketing practices. You still need metrics for tracking hard business results, you still need compelling messages, you still need to listen hard to customers. It’s still about building satisfied customers and champions. You still need CRM, because the speed and availability of information online means the customer becomes the centre of everything you do.
Tracking interactions has become more important online, with leads and sales happening as a consequence of managing collaborative customer engagements and interactions to solve their business problems. What is a waste of time is the idea of collecting fans and followers. The goal of social media activity is to build advocates, which means credibility and a clearly differentiated offering if you are to leverage the benefits social media can bring. For more information Contact Us

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Posted by Wayne C

2 Very different approaches to implementing CRM!

October 19, 2012

We’ve recently been involved with a couple of CRM implementations (one mid-sized, the other early stages of an enterprise roll out) which have been very different experiences and have revealed some interesting learning!

Firstly, let me explain the projects. Project A was for a mid-size investment bank in the City of London that wanted to replace 3 separate but integrated systems for managing their client information, to help run events and road shows and generally to move from a transaction-centric business to one more defined by having sustainable client relationships. They expected to have around 300 users in locations all over the world using Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The key stakeholders included senior business executives and managers, as well as some of the sales team, account managers and events team. Engagement with IT at the start was limited (more of that later!).

A few key points were driven home by the client at the early stages of the engagement:

  • Business users absolutely had to have current, integrated client data available from Day 1
  • We were instructed It was not going to be possible to have parts of the business or parts of the functionality delivered in stages, it had to be “all or nothing”
  • The business appeared to have more trust in us as an external supplier than they did in their own IT function (perhaps partly because the IT function had created the systems that were now being replaced due to lack of adoption and

The project required loads of custom development to Microsoft Dynamics CRM to deliver all the business functionality and integration, which in turn needed lots of testing. A combination of impatience from the senior management to have something to show and some technical challenges around integration eventually led to the business deciding that they could, in fact, put some users live without all the functionality and that once they’d done that, actual user experience of using the software was a far faster and more accurate method of gauging the real user requirements – after we had done hundreds of man days work!

Project B is the first stage in a global roll out for an enterprise organisation with offices worldwide, expecting to have around 3,000 people using the new system (again, based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM), although they had already decide to do this in ‘baby’ steps, with only 17 users being on the system initially. With less than 20 days consulting we have put an initial system live and the users are happy with it, as they understand it is just stage 1 of a longer project. Mind you, one difficulty has been the demands of one of the senior business sponsors who insists that mobile is in scope (when it was agreed not to be) and has added various other minor (but “critical”) requirements once we started work.

My key conclusion is that wherever possible, the maxim “start small and build on success” is especially true of CRM projects, wherever possible and taking into data requirements and integration.

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Posted by Matt D

4 key data management challenges for CRM success

September 6, 2012

 

Managing Data – what goes wrong?

Our previous blog discussed the importance of keeping a close eye on the business objectives of CRM projects, pointed out that CRM is adopted not installed, and considered what to do about some common challenges which can cause these projects to fail.

It also looked at the benefits from treating each department to be included in the CRM rollout as a profit centre within the overall project. This implied the need to have a clear plan for managing data.

Just possessing a lot of data is a waste of time. The ability to analyse data, draw conclusions and easily take action is where real competitive advantage comes from. Trouble is, most organisations have a virtual sea of data around their businesses, contained in multiple Outlook contact lists, data warehouses, marketing lists, accounting packages, spreadsheets, old CRM systems, Word lists and as hard copy lists. In many organisations each business area may be running their own database or databases, possibly in multiple locations with inconsistent naming conventions.

A key part of the move to a single view of the truth is having an overarching and clear plan for cleaning and migrating all this data into one place. Your shiny new CRM system is a waste of money without clean data in it.

-          That seems straightforward, what could be the problem?

1.       Defining a “best”record

Data can be a surprisingly emotive subject. Any discussions about data can quickly turn into a discussion about potential new working practices. Involve departmental heads and teams early in workshops to explore what data should be contained in a definitive client / prospect / contact record and develop an agreement of how cleaner better data will benefit them in their roles.

2.       Planning stages of data migration

Spend time on a data migration and mapping plan which all parties agree to, if need be, department by department.  As Microsoft Gold Partners Kynetix follow a version of Microsoft Dynamics “Surestep”. This provides an established deployment process and a range of useful documents to ensure success in managing project implementations.

3.       Creating consistent naming conventions

Naming conventions within systems need to be consistent across the business. Over time the taxonomy used within a business can vary from department to department. What exactly is a “lead”, and how does it differ from a prospect, an enquiry or a suspect? If a Client hasn’t bought from you for two years should you still call them a Client or are they really a Hot Prospect?

4.     Agreeing firm dates to start using it !

At the start of a project there may be entrenched ways of working. The benefits of moving to a centralised single view of the truth need to be understood by departmental heads. Involve each of them in clear actions and timings to agree definitions, clean and migrate data from each department into the central record, and set cast in stone dates to begin using this new dataset.

Beware your large CRM project drifting back to where it started with data in multiple locations again. Manage data usage pre, during and post each departments go live dates.  Marketing departments with their liking for keeping specific marketing lists can be a culprit.

Managing the data component of CRM implementations can take more time than you think and require an objective, often external perspective on the most practical way forward. For a no obligation chat about CRM data management challenges Contact Us

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Posted by Wayne C

5 common reasons why CRM projects go wrong

September 6, 2012

In CSO Insight’s 2012 Sales Performance Optimisation (SPO) study, 18.7% of respondents said they wouldn’t recommend their CRM system to anyone else and 82% of respondents said they hadn’t seen a sales increase since investing in CRM ! This raises the question

” Do you think this means that 18.7% or 82% of CRM systems don’t work properly, or could it be that the implementation has in some way been flawed?”What are some common reasons why CRM projects go wrong?

1. Time and forgetting why you wanted it: CRM projects take time. Bigger CRM projects which impinge on several areas of the business are often entered into without sufficient time, human resource and money being allocated to planning and managing the roll out across the business. As a result two things happen: the original business objectives for doing it can be lost, and as the project progresses the realisation of value from the investment isn’t made clear to stakeholders.  As a result they get frustrated and the project becomes seen as a cost rather than a business initiative delivering a return on investment (“ROI”).

2. Not keeping it simple: Keeping a really clear idea of the business reasons for starting the project and how simple you intended it to be is really important. The general idea with CRM is that organisations choose a CRM system on the basis that it has out of the box functionality which, related to their specific business needs, looks like it will be easy to use and will be cost effective. The idea being that what should be implemented to start with is the simplest possible functionality for the lowest possible cost to achieve a business goal.  User numbers and functionality can then be developed from this solid base.

3. Scope creep: Trouble is, business users can get excited and motivated about CRM ! Your CRM implementation starts off well specified with a clear idea of the business purpose, CRM functionality, training and timescales needed to realise benefits at that phase.  As you roll through the implementation process business users see iterations of the system and their understanding develops over time both of what CRM does now and what it could do for them in the future. This can lead to two things, either a new series of “must have’s” or an insistence that CRM should have had XYZ functionality all along. This is the infamous scope creep, and it can add to the complexity of the system, confuse goals, increase costs and delay roll out.

Make sure the CRM implementation does what the scope in the user story or detailed spec says it does. Make sure functionality and timescales and business benefits are documented and agreed to by the senior stakeholders and convey this to departmental heads. Use this as a reason not to delay.  If the agreed business benefit of CRM in this department is £X,000 per annum then allowing implementation to slip by four months will potentially cost £Y,000.

Manage scope creep by documenting all the newly discovered “must have” functionality in one place and agree to revisit and prioritise it all as a next tranche of possible work when the success criteria for phase one has been reached.  Revisiting this bundle of possible work later will also have the effect of prioritising needs and identifying which of the changes are actually important and which were just a whim.

4. Losing sight of the ROI Keep reminding stakeholders of the anticipated ROI from carrying out the overall project and drive the business improvement department by department. This can be achieved by breaking organisation wide CRM into a series of linked CRM projects, effectively a business change programme with a series of profit milestones. Each project within the programme must be treated as a profit centre, delivered to a timeframe and have a clear plan for how ROI will be achieved in each department, then prove it to stakeholders. Think in terms of Where’s the Money…

5. Also, make someone take ownership. If there are sound reasons for implementing CRM in multiple departments there must be a business case with a projected quantified ROI in each area. Managing the ROI of rollout across the business means having someone responsible for the whole programme, who plans the rollout in each area, quantifies the benefit and ensures the programme hits time cost and benefit goals.

Remember, CRM is adopted not installed…For an informal no obligation chat about making your CRM implementation work contact us

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Posted by Wayne C

Analytical and Operational CRM: What is it?

September 6, 2012

Isn’t CRM just CRM? Why do we even want to think about CRM in terms of Analytical and Operational? Because it helps us think about the scope of implementations, clarifies how CRM and its data is used, and helps us group the people using CRM technology by recognising their different requirements. This can be hugely useful when establishing the need initially, planning business change and user training or managing “buy in” from user groups.

There are many descriptions of “CRM” from the simple to the overly academic, depending on who is interested.  Starting from a simple approach helps because there isn’t a simple single answer to what Analytical or Operational CRM is. My dead simple favourite is “CRM is about ways of looking after your customers better.”

It might be helpful to think in terms of the outputs from each, which part of the business wants it and for what purpose.

Business management typically wants better information, insights and reporting on what is going on so they can make better decisions more quickly. This requirement is fulfilled by Analytical CRM, which can be thought of as the part of CRM which turns data into knowledge.  Which performance indicators are required, and the best way to have that data summarised, can make a huge difference to how easily it is understood and is crucial to getting the best from your CRM system. This is the subject of another blog article.

Client facing teams  – whether field based teams, support desks, marketing, telemarketing teams or administration  – typically want information that makes their lives easier. Trouble is, these are disparate teams which often have their own databases, which can mean there is a challenge getting the data into one place to do something useful with it. Hence the data is centralised in some way into a CRM system.

To keep this data meaningful, email is linked into this centralised system, data from websites can be linked automatically, and the whole accessed and updated from mobiles… So every way of contacting the customer is linked into CRM  - and we have Operational CRM.

Day to day, it is the series of activities involved in every aspect of the business that affects creating a single unified view of the customer.  It provides the information which is used by Analytical CRM.

Now if you think about it, achieving and maintaining a single view of the customer implies a unified business growth strategy and a clear centralised data location and data management strategy , and is completely different to how many business operate with data currently. For a no obligation chat about your growth strategy and how CRM will help, contact us.

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Posted by Wayne C

What is CRM and why do I want it?

September 6, 2012

Many initial client / vendor discussions about CRM go something like this.

Client:  “We are interested in a new CRM system. Tell me about XYZ. “

Vendor: “What do you actually want CRM for, how will you quantify success in it?”

Client: “Huh?”

In all seriousness, even now CRM is all too often treated as a magic bullet which will fix a variety of sales based business ills without having a clear idea of specifically how the business is to benefit from it. This blog is to raise a few high level thoughts about how to make CRM more of a success, faster.

So, what is CRM? The most important point is that Customer Relationship Management is a business process not a piece of technology.  The technology gives you a way of converting data into useable information so you can make better business decisions faster.  It also gives you a way of putting all the information which relates to your client (or prospect, but for ease let’s just call them all clients) in one place so team members can do their jobs more effectively. These two purposes for CRM are often referred to as Operational and Analytic CRM, but more about that in a separate blog.

CRM has to meet a variety of different business needs according to the specific requirements of the client. As a result, any CRM system will have far more out of the box functionality than is required, at least to start with. So what is really required when selecting a CRM vendor is a partner who can relate the huge functionality of their system to your business needs and suggest the most effective ways of you making a return on your investment.  In practice organisations often break their reasons for wanting CRM into too granular a level of detail. Think about why you want CRM from the point of view of business benefit to come from better business processes. You can’t treat CRM technology in isolation because without considering how your process and people elements are to be managed your technology investment will fail.

Think of it like this:

So Why do you want CRM? When you are planning how to make CRM a success the highest level question is the most useful in driving business benefit but it’s also the least frequently asked: “How will this investment in new technology and processes improve the available cash to shareholders”?

If you drill down from that high level objective you arrive at needing a business plan to make any improvement quantifiable either as improved revenue or margin, or as more efficient process which reduce your cost base. Breaking this down again, if you are to prove an improvement in cash generated you have to answer questions of priorities, timescales, and the human activities to achieve these goals, and now you finally are in the area of how CRM technology can help. (One tip: think in terms of CRM technology tracking people’s behaviours rather than just KPI’s, which track outcomes only).

As Microsoft Gold Partners Kynetix follows our own fast and efficient version of the tried and tested Dynamics Surestep process.  You won’t be surprised to learn that this breaks implementing CRM into a series of clearly documented stages, with a strong emphasis on the Diagnostic and Analysis stages to ensure client and vendor understands and has processes in place to the problem to be solved. If you think you may want a hand in making money from CRM throughout the process of change contact us.

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Posted by Wayne C

The central versus personal dichotomy

August 24, 2012

One of the constant challenges in implementing CRM solutions is that of the potential clash between the corporate goals and objectives of a new system and the personal ones of its potential users.

A common example of this is that sales people generally feel their contacts are ‘theirs’, whereas the company feels that it ‘owns’ the contacts or relationships.

There is also a sometimes more subtle difference between companies and their employees; the fact that the system is often designed and developed centrally and follows ‘a one size suits all’ approach. It is assumed that all users must use the new centralised system.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM  goes a long way to solving this by enabling role-specific forms to be used, so that users can see just the information they require, but what about a situation where different groups of users have specialist applications that they have developed or acquired, dedicated to certain job functions? Getting these groups of users to switch to a central system often alienates them before the project has even started!

End User Developed applications

Not so long ago we came across this situation when research analysts at a large US investment back had a ‘morning call’ application (developed internally by the business users themselves) which was geared to working exactly the way they needed, i.e. a very concise list of phone calls to be made, with call details such as contact name, phone number, last call date easily visible.

This application enabled them to be highly proficient efficient in making the calls but provided a challenge in that the data they collected (call notes, follow up actions) needed to be transferred to the enterprise wide client information system, a time consuming and burdensome process.

Our solution was to leave the call application in place and provide a framework for 2-way data exchange from and to the enterprise platform, which we have named “Satellite CRM”.

Best of both worlds

We’ve now formalised this approach in to a Satellite CRM framework, which allows users to use their favourite applications (subject to the normal rules regarding security, etc.) while updating the single central data source. Of course, this approach is very similar to mobilising CRM where specific separate apps run on mobile devices while updating centralised client information.

We are now seeing many situations where Dynamics CRM can be deployed to small teams or departments and our Satellite CRM framework used to update an existing central enterprise system; or specialist (end-user developed) apps connecting with a centrally deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform to provide the best of with worlds.

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Posted by Matt D

The new Martini…

February 9, 2012

Microsoft has announced that the Q2 update for 2012 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 will include a number of new capabilities. Based on the premise “CRM Anywhere” (hence the reference to the 70’s Martini advert: ‘Anytime, anyplace, anywhere’!), the update will include new capabilities around:

  • Mobility
  • Browser Flexibility
  • Social (Activity Feeds)
  • Industry Templates
  • SQL Server 2012

Of all of these, Mobility and SQL Server 2012 interest our clients the most (at least in the short term).

Mobility

Microsoft will be launching a new product called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile, which will enable customers to use CRM on up to three devices per user (note: IFD required for On Premise instances).

There will be native clients (i.e. offline support) for Windows Phone 7.5, Apple iPhone & iPad, Android and some BlackBerry devices.

Browser Flexibility

With this release, CRM will be fully supported on: Internet Explorer 7 or above; Safari 5.1.1 or above on Mac OS-X or iOS5; Firefox 6 or above; Chrome 13 or above (platform restriction may apply – ask us for more details!).

Industry Templates

Building on the work of Microsoft partners and its own consulting team, the Dynamics Labs will be releasing several industry templates into the Dynamics Marketplace. The first few templates are likely to be:

  • Non-Profit
  • Health Sales Plans
  • Wealth Management
  • Relationship Management for Health.

The templates will likely include data model customisations, dashboards, workflows and some sample data. They’re designed to help customers in those industries visualise how Dynamics CRM can help their business, and speed up an implementation without necessarily being a fully-packaged vertical industry product.

SQL Server 2012

Microsoft’s own data centres have already been upgraded to SQL Server 2012 and the new CRM update will bring official support for partners and customers wanting to upgrade their own deployments to SQL Server 2012. Additionally, there will be some new CRM features that make use of SQL Server 2012 new capabilities. For example: performance improvements, enhanced database recovery, next generation business intelligence (“Crescent”) such as pre-defined Power Pivot models, Power View reports and time-animated reports.

For more information, download the R8 Release Preview Guide from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM website: http://crmpublish.blob.core.windows.net/docs/ReleasePreviewGuide.pdf

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Posted by Matt D

Getting started with Dynamics CRM 2011

October 19, 2010

Last week I spent the day at the Microsoft Dynamics Convergence 2010 Europe event. My objective was to focus on the new features of Dynamics CRM 2011.

Outlook integration has improved significantly, benefiting from using Outlook objects for entity views rather than embedded web pages like previous versions. The advantage of this is that you get features such as sorting and filtering for entity views (i.e. Contact, Account), making the user experience similar to working with standard Outlook lists such as your inbox.

The User experience has changed considerably within the Web client, I think mostly for the better. The first thing most people will notice is that Tabs on forms have been replaced with continuous forms including links, compressible/expandable sections and a fixed header and footer (I’ll reserve judgement on this!).

I could go on for ages about all the new features, however to spare you from that I have listed a few of my favourites below.

My favourite features include:

  • Grid views on main form
  • Integration with SharePoint
  • Record count on grids (how can this have been missed before!)
  • Vastly enhanced form customisation
  • Workflow dialogs
  • Microsoft Ribbons
  • Improved BI via Dashboards and inline visualisations.
  • Packaging up configuration and customisation in Solutions

 
Some disappointments:

  • New field level security and multi forms per entity only role based (i.e. entity record criteria not included)
  • SharePoint integration doesn’t include security integration, this has to be managed manually on SharePoint.

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Posted by Steve Adam

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