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Identify Where Your CRM Risk Lies

Your CRM Strategy Will Fail If You Don't!

CRM risk is an area of high risk. There, I've said the obvious! Now, let's agree that CRM risk is not identifying the things that can cause your project to go awry. Not identifying it is just as bad as identifying it and not planning for it appropriately.

Not Identifying the Proper Path

Early on in the exercise is when you will identify the things you would like to improve in your business. CRM is all about a customer-centric focus to your business (after all it stands for Customer Relationship Management). Understanding what you don't know, or do know, is important. If you don't have high confidence that you have identified how you will change, and improve, your communication to customers, for example, your business case won't be very persuasive.

Therefore, the first CRM risk is not having a comprehensive and detailed plan to change your business to the benefit of your customers.

Project Staff and CRM Risk

Not everyone in your company is going to be capable of helping you understand your customers better as an individual. As a team, they may be very creative and find very useful bits of information for your to consider. However, be careful when you put this burden on a single staff member. Make sure they understand the mission, or can be trained to understand it. Otherwise, it make sense to get some outside help.

Processes and CRM Risk

Always keep in mind that a CRM strategy is a unified enterprise wide plan for creating customer loyalty. Therefore individual processes need to be looked at as part of the whole. Don't start making changes to tactical processes until changes have been made at the enterprise, or strategic, level.

Every individual processe must work toward the goals of the overall enterprise strategy and not be driven by the needs, and desires, of departments or people. These groups must use tactics that support the enterprise first.

Corporate Politics and CRM Risk

Don't fool yourself, your company isn't just one big happy family. Trust me on this. I've worked with many companies over the years and I know how hard it is for some business owners to see this.

Many people fear change. They fear that they will lose clout in the new organization. I'm not going to go into the details, because there are many. But, I've seen many attempts at sabotage over the years. This happens overtly sometimes, but usually it's passive. The way around this is through strong change management to eliminate any personal, or department, reasons for resistance.

Each person needs to understand where the business is, where it's trying to get and why. More importantly, they need to know the issues that they will take ownership of. Once they have an ownership role, they will buy-in to the whole thing. And this will eliminate the CRM risk associated with user adoption.

Technology and CRM Risk

At some point you will be making (or receiving) recommendations on the technology foundation for your CRM initiative. Since you hope to achieve repeatable CRM benefits over the years, you need to make sure this technology will grow with you (in other words it has to be scalable). You should also ensure that your staff has the appropriate skill sets to manage and maintain the platform over time to minimize CRM risk.

Funding and CRM Risk

I've talked about this a number of times and I can't emphasize this enough. Spending less does not necessarily mean a higher return on investment. More often than not, this mentality drives the process backwards in that CRM software is generally purchased cheap with the belief that if it doesn't work out you're no worse for the wear.

Now, does that sound like the correct way to invest money? Occasionally, I work with public companies and they typically don't enjoy the scrutiny they receive when they make investments that appear to be discretionary. So I ask, why would any business owner operate that way.

Quantify your benefits, and your costs, and agree to invest your money and resources for a reasonable return. A million to one is simply ridiculous!