When it comes to choosing an an approach to Customer Relationship Management inside your business, it's important to understand all the benefits of a such a system before beginning your selection process.
These "Back to Basics" ideas for implementing a CRM program within an organisation have been collected from executives, managers, employees and consultants who shared their experiences. The goal of this series of articles, appearing over 8 weeks, is to provide you with useful information as you choose a new CRM system.
Following on from our previous article, let's to look to our third post and two more ideas:
5. Planning pays
To ensure a successful CRM project, planning is essential. Begin by defining the need for CRM -- arm yourself with the background information to justify the investment costs and to demonstrate where the benefits, savings and return on investment will come from.
Next, define the stakeholders in the project and work through a "needs analysis & benefits" to form a foundation for establishing a common, company-wide goal for CRM. With this groundwork completed, you can now establish a budget, planning for the costs associated with identifying vendors, testing applications, implementation, integration, training and support. A team should then be assembled to begin the drive towards completion of the project - a drive that begins with a clear description of your company's objectives and any processes that will have to be modified to make the project successful. Remember, too - make sure the head of this team is a CRM champion - someone who completely believes that the CRM program will make a measurable difference to the company.
Good planning will involve discussions with internal and external customers. What are the best practices for your sales force, for your marketing team, for customer service? Also consider the various types of data that are important to track for each group involved. Data required by different groups of system users, such as field sales representatives, may be different from those of customer service agents. Plan for the needs of each group by confirming that your data requirements list is complete.
Remember: any person who requires information available through the CRM software should be considered a system user, whether he or she is an internal staff member, an external partner, or a customer.
6. Prepare for product demonstrations
Once possible products and vendors are identified, a demonstration will be a critical factor in determining which software is best for your company. But before inviting vendors in, be sure you have told them exactly what you are looking for. Why waste time evaluating a product that may be very functional but just will not work in your environment?
When comparing several products it is advisable to establish a scoring system that makes it easy to track the various benefits and shortcoming of each product being evaluated. By tabulating these scores, the decision process is often simplified. But be sure to include qualitative information in these lists, such as a vendor's history of innovation, customer satisfaction, financial stability and so on.
And finally, make sure the CRM implementation team attends the demo, and encourage them to share their concerns and feedback. If the vendor or reseller cannot immediately address any issues raised, make sure they do so in a reasonable time frame. Responsiveness is often a key differentiator in the vendor selection process, so some planned tough questions may be critical to making a selection you can live with long into the future.
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