Attention
CEO! Defeat This CRM Health Risk
There may be a highly virulent
and widespread tendency spreading through your organization. For
more than 2o years, I have observed it in many corporations,
particularly banks and financial institutions. It is something that
must be brought under control as quickly as possible if you want to
have a healthy, sustainable CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
system that delivers true competitive advantages and on-going
profitability improvements.
This threat has many variations, but they all fall within an
innocent sounding category called “Application
Islands.” There may be many of these within an organization.
They are generally born out of a mid- to upper-management level
initiative to achieve some specific result. Fair enough. Over time
Application Islands grow through an unending series of simple
modifications while they accumulate a retinue of developers,
support people, trainers, etc. In other words, they take on a life
of their own. Soon their champions are attempting to bend their pet
Application Islands to solve problems they were never intended to
solve. CRM is often one of these.
A few common examples of Application Islands include: Financial
Planning, Monthly Reporting and Yearly Planning systems. They have
one important thing in common. They were conceived and implemented
from the top of the organization without taking into account the
needs of the frontline, customer-facing revenue producers at the
bottom.
Let’s take Yearly Planning as a case in point. Rather than
creating tools within the CRM system used by the workers in the
trenches, this high level planning system swoops down from above to
strong-arm data from a variety of sources. It then compiles the
data in the form of reports, which are printed, collated and
assembled into copious three-ring binders. These are quickly
browsed, admired and shelved for the remainder of the year because
they present no clear method to implement the plan.
The problem is that these systems produce a static collection of
abstractions that do not tie back into the systems that the end
users actually employ to produce revenue for the company. Since it
is not live data, managers cannot do ongoing analysis against it.
Even worse, this Application Island provides revenue producers with
no tools they can use to implement plans promulgated from on high.
That’s because there is no live, integrated data that can be
captured, analyzed and modified during the day-to-day workflow of
the organization’s actual business processes.
Now I have a secret that you are not going to like. Your revenue
producers hate these Application Islands. They resent the time and
energy that must be expended feeding data into them. They are not
tools end users can employ to do their own jobs better and produce
more revenue for the organization.
So what should you do about this threat to your corporation’s
profitability?
First: If
this really isn’t a problem for your organization,
congratulations. Celebrate! And remember—Don’t let it
become one.
Second:
If your organization
does have some of these islands, don’t even think about
modifying one of them into a CRM system. Double back and perform a
system-wide review of all your applications to find out which ones
you actually need. Then redesign these to integrate with live
information from your CRM system.
Third:
Design or redesign
your CRM system twice: First from the bottom up, taking into
account all your revenue producers’ needs for doing their
jobs better. Then design it again from the top down, incorporating
the same live data functions to build management tools for analysis
and reporting.
The Top Down/Bottom Up approach will give both management and end
users what they need most: actionable information and lively tools
for responding to it.
About
the author: Jay Bauer is President and Chief
Process Analyst for STI Systems, a CRM consultancy with a success
rate substantially higher than industry averages.
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