How to Avoid CRM Failures at Your Company

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Don't Let This Happen To You

***tier2square.shtml***CRM Failures are abundant and we've been hearing about them for years. The well publicized ones are usually large enterprises that have some name recognition. However, they happen daily in the middle market as well.

CRM seems like such a simple problem to solve for many companies because they still think that they can just install some software, add a few fields, automate a few processes and bingo! CRM Success.

Unfortunately, it's a little more complicated than this; even with smaller companies. As with any business, the key to success, outside of luck, is planning and execution over time. Both components require dedication and hard work. There is nothing easy about it. However, if you take the easy path, CRM failures become easy to achieve.

If you are wondering if your company is heading in this direction, here are some common attributes of a CRM initiative that is doomed to failure.

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• The management team does not have a shared vision with regard to customer relationships.
• The failure to define a clear set of measureable business or economic objectives
• Disregarding your position in your customer-centric evolution and attempting to bite off more than your organization is ready to chew.
• Change management has not been planned for or managed and participants do not clearly see the benefit to them.
• Placing too much focus on technology and too little on the abilities of your employees.
• You've put the cart before the horse. In other words, you selected technology and then tried to develop a plan that fits the technology while not addressing the needs and desires of your customers.
• The failure to review your existing processes and their fit with your new vision and your new technology.
• You haven't taken into account what your customers expect.
• The quality of your customer data is low, and it lessens the effectiveness of your new strategy and tactics
• You haven't thought thru the controls needed to ensure a high quality process and/or you haven't tested them thoroughly.

There is no point in having a unified customer-centric vision at the executive level if each department, division, or product line manager still has control over the their own marketing message(s).

I talk about developing a CRM strategy here. For now, let's have some fun and talk about some CRM failures!

The "Oblivious to Failure"  failure

Something I see a lot in the middle market (and smaller companies wanting to appear bigger) is a rush to implement technology and a failure to develop a plan which defines some measureable objectives.  What often happens here is that a lot of smart people provide their requirements independent of the other smart people. In other words, there is no collective corporate vision.

These requirements tend to look like this:

• Putting up a customer service portal for the submission of help desk tickets because someone doesn't like all the emails and phone calls they get.
• An email alert to an employee that tells them there is a To-Do on their calendar because they're too busy to check it daily.
• Creating an electronic form or spreadsheet that looks just like the one they manually compile from 6 different systems (both electronic and paper systems) which will still have to be manually input. But it sounds like a great idea.

Ever seen this before?

Once this stuff is installed, they start to forget about it almost immediately. What they are really doing is ignoring it because it's not doing anything for them. No customers come to the portal, people still use Excel spreadsheets and the To-Do reminders are routed to a folder that is never reviewed because it's annoying. That's failure. And it wasn't the software that failed.

"Software is the Solution" failure

This is classic. Either a software salesman or some sort of slick marketing  campaign has convinced a business owner/executive that a well known software package will solve their problems. After all, it has a colorful funnel that will tell you everything you need to know about your pipeline....in real time!

What this CRM player is failing to consider is that people need to put the data in the system before you will see the results. What have you done for them? How many of them will lie? How many of them fear sharing information with their peers? What will you do if the deals that close, were never in the pipeline (would that cause production or inventory problems)?

There are so many parts of a complete CRM strategy that are missing...when you don't create it in the first place. This is just one example of where things begin to break down and lead to CRM failures. Let's not forget about the expectations of your customers. What is going to change for them? Companies that don't acknowledge the "Customer" in customer relationship management are doomed to CRM failures.

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