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The Change Management Process

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The change management process must start with an understand of the hurdles you will face. And there will be hurdles, because the natural tendency for people is to resist change.

Not being trained in the inner workings of peoples brains, I won't try to explain why some people adapt to change and others don't, but I do know that resistance can be especially powerful when a group of people feels threatened.

We all have bills to pay, and especially today, as I write this article, it's important to note this. A change will be perceived as a threat to the jobs your staff enjoys today. I've been through the change management process a number of times in my career, as an employee. In one case, there was a team of secretive consultants engaged by the company. They tried to engage the middle management by including them in exercises of uncovering unnecessary expenses.

While they were partially included in the process, it was clear that the rest of us were going to be having perks removed from our daily work lives. We also had the sneaking suspicion that jobs were going to be cut. And based on the trimming around the edges that we were seeing, it was obvious these would not be surgical cuts; those designed to eliminate the true waste and preserve resources that would help the company be more productive.

For nearly a year, most of the people I knew there were more than a little bit worried, including myself. And I was proven to be correct in my worries.

Why Did The Change Management Process Fail?

My personal story as an employee of one of the largest financial services companies wasn't related to CRM. That was just one of the problems. The other problem was the change management itself.

Public companies are notorious for nipping away at easily identified expenses, or simply picking a percentage and forcing everyone to snip it from their budgets. That's because the market demands that they produce short-term results. Investors like you and me don't demand it because we're in it for the long haul, but the Wall Street types are looking to line their pockets in the short-term. I'm usually not against greed or capitalism, but I am totally against a CEO who can't see that long term value creation and customer loyalty is in the best interest of everyone.

So, the first failure is in the focus of the change. I think we are all seeing, today (2009), that the focus has been a complete failure. If you deliver value to your customers, the kind of value they are screaming for (listen), your margins will improve as your cost of sales drops (existing customers are cheaper than finding new ones constantly). To do this, you can't slice away at valuable resources on a percentage basis.

What I'm suggesting here is that the goal of the change needs to be on target, and that is improving customer loyalty by putting at the center of any changes you make. Going through this process will reveal numerous areas of inefficiencies, and they won't be guesses. So, in addition to keeping customers longer and reducing your selling costs, you'll also find that you can reduce staff, but the difference will be that you've identified truly unnecessary processes and functions in your business. Hacking away tends to inhibit necessary processes more than anything else.

What Should The Change Management Process Look Like

One of the things I've learned since leaving banking and becoming a CRM consultant is that there needs to be a clear goal communicated that focuses on making the customer experience better. It also needs to be clear that ideas and experiences will be evaluated at all levels of the company and not simply come from the executive offices.

To do this, the leader of the company must empower a cross-functional team with representatives from all levels of the organization - with an emphasis on customer facing staff. The team will have to do many things:

Such as identifying current information flows and locate and inefficiencies or bottlenecks.
Finding out what their customer experiences look like from the customers view point, and they may require asking them
From the customer's perspective, identify new ways for work and information to flow between functions to make their experience better
Clearly communicate to their peers what is being done, why it will be better for customers and the company, and why they should take some ownership of the ideas.

Leaving staff in the dark is not the right approach. The change management process should include communication milestones in addition to the team's daily interaction with their peers. When people are a part of the process, and understand why it's being done, they are far more likely to participate in the outcomes.