IMV38: Evaluating the Right CRM System

The following is a transcript for IMV39: Media Shifts in the Automotive Industry. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast, brought to you by MindComet. And, now, here’s your host, Paul Lewis.

Paul Lewis:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo. I’m your host Paul Lewis. And today we’re going to talk about customer relationship management. Our guest today is Mark Behrens. He’s the president of TriSynergy Consulting. They are experts in the field of CRM. Mark, can you tell us a little bit about TriSynergy?

Mark Behrens:

Sure, Paul. TriSynergy was founded over five years ago now. We focused specifically on contact center and CRM, or customer relationship management, technology and operations and strategy projects for our clients. We’re an independent firm with no alliances to any particular vendor in the space. Work with clients across many industries. But again really just with a pinpoint focus on the kinds of operational and technological challenges that come with trying to implement customer contact strategies and customer relationship management strategies.

Prior to founding TriSynergy Consulting I was a partner in a national consulting practice that specialized in integrating customer relationship management applications. Some of the well known ones whose names are no longer quiet the same as they used to be given the acquisition has gone on in the marketplace.

Paul Lewis:

Sure.

Mark Behrens:

Did literally hundreds of those projects over a five year period. And all of our folks, myself included, bring to the table 15 years or more experience in implementing technology in the customer service, sales, marketing, contact center environment. So that’s what gives us the claim on expertise that you’ve credited us with. Thank you.

Paul Lewis:

For our audience that may not be as familiar with the functions of CRM can you tell us just in general a little bit about CRMs and how that plays in an organization today?

Mark Behrens:

We would start by saying that CRM is not a system. And really encourage our clients to step back and look at CRM most importantly as a strategy. And then out of that the organization process and supporting technologies that you use to implement that strategy. So from our perspective the point of CRM is that you want to have every contact with the customer both increase your value to the customer and increase the customer’s value to you. So customer relationship value is about building in that life cycle kind of support. So whether it’s a marketing contact, sales contact, service or repair contact. And regardless of the channel that each of those contacts increases your knowledge about the customer, increases the value of that knowledge to you. But also increases your value to the customer so that it’s making the relationship one with greater loyalty and greater longevity.

Then within that, we look at technology as a component of that. And again CRM systems really aren’t even one system these days. But are comprised of literally hundreds of modules in a large scale CRM system that span the gamut of functions from marketing and campaign automation, data warehousing and analytics, customer service, contact management, sales force automation, on through to very specific focused support for logistics and service contract management. Finally out to the help desk end of the spectrum. So a full bore CRM suite will include modules that can support literally every aspect of an organization’s relationship with its customers.

Paul Lewis:

With such a broad capability how should companies who don’t have a CRM in place today or maybe a CRM with limited capabilities today evaluate which type of system and what types of functionality do they need? And maybe even further how do companies that already have a CRM determine if they’re utilizing the capabilities effectively in all those diverse areas?

Mark Behrens:

It’s really important again to start from the strategic level and determine the level of commitment of the organization. Although there are technology solutions that can cover that wide range of capability and literally support every aspect of the enterprise. If the organization’s strategy isn’t really aligned or defined to enable you to take advantage of them, you’ll end up paying for quite a bit of capability that you aren’t ever going to use. And that’s gonna challenge the return on your investment, your ability to capture that.

So the first place that we work with our clients in this kind of analysis is to really say, “What’s the level of opportunity? What’s your vision?” To be able to take advantage of enterprise capability you’ve got to have an enterprise strategy, an enterprise commitment to the change that it takes to really be able to leverage CRM across all of your channels and in all of your lines of business. There are many more siloed or pinpoint kinds of applications for CRM technology where real benefits can be gained. So a common example of this would be in a call center or contact center environment where your customer service or sales agents may have to deal with 10, 15, 20 different systems in order to complete a transaction with the customer. CRM systems are often used as a means of pulling get-together data from disparate systems and presenting it to the agent in an interface that’s more effective, easier to learn, easier to navigate, that better supports presenting a script and information about particular campaign to that agent so the agent can be more effective.

So, the first thing to do is really figure out what’s the size of your opportunity, both in the immediate case and then longer term is there a commitment at the organizational level to make the change and make the investment that it takes to take advantage of a full CRM suite. Then from there to look at the tools that offer the capability that really you can use. And the same is true if you’re an environment that already has made an investment in an existing tool. Such as an Oracle or SAP. Being able to step back and say, “What are the key opportunities in front of me now?” And pull out of those the key requirements. And then match those to the capabilities of the tool. If you’re for example in a marketing function and what you’re really looking for is the ability to do campaign automation the fact that you’ve already implemented a CRM tool may not really give you any significant advantage because typically those marketing and campaign automation functions are in separate modules that require additional cost and additional integration. So unless those capabilities are already in-house you may not gain a lot by just continuing with the current tool.

Paul Lewis:

With this complexity could you tell us a little bit about some of the challenges the business faces when implementing such a system, or conversely what are the main reasons that businesses fail to generate the value that they anticipated with their CRM system?

Mark Behrens:

The main reason why CRM systems fail is that businesses place too much priority on the technology and not enough on the business change that they hope the technology will drive. So over and over we see – and it’s not unique to CRM. It’s a pattern that unfortunately repeats itself in every new generation of technology and solution that comes out. Folks get enamored with the technology and the idea that in order to solve this business problem all I have to do is buy $500,000 worth or $5 million dollars worth of that technology and I’ll solve that problem. Technology is only effective if you use it to change the way you do business.

So inevitably the number one reason why CRM implementations fail is that there wasn’t an understanding of and commitment to the business change that the technology was supposed to enable. After that, the next most frequent reason that CRM implementations fail is that there’s not an appreciation of the complexity of the project and both the depth and breadth of skills that are required typically to make a CRM implementation successful. These are often projects that are relatively new to an organization’s IT resources - often new to the functional marketing or sales or service. Business area is involved as well. So it’s an area where it’s really helpful to bring in outside expertise. Whether that’s members of the vendor’s team that have expertise in implementing the product, outside consultants who have experience in managing CRM implementations and understand the kinds of challenges. This is really a place where spending a little extra money up front to leverage expertise that’s been there and done that before, and can help your company avoid some of the common mistakes, can help make your project more successful more quickly and more smoothly than otherwise is the case.

Paul Lewis:

So Mark what I hear you saying is it’s important to get buy-in from the very top level of the organization on down into the various areas of the business that are going to be impacted by this and to actually be able to change the process and the way people utilize these systems. And at the same time it’s very beneficial to bring in a team that has done this before that has the experience and the track record and to help with that knowledge transfer to get the project off on a running start.

Mark Behrens:

Absolutely. The other advice that I would give is have a well defined phased approach to this. Although CRM is something that effects the life cycle of your relationship with the customer, it’s not technology that we recommend trying to implement in all places all at the same time in a big bang approach. Big bang approaches tend to go produce big busts in this kind of a solution. So figuring out where your greatest opportunity is, perhaps saying, “We’d like to do a more effective job of being able to identify and target campaigns” or “…a better job of being able to measure campaign response and provide assistance to the agent in the call center to identify that a caller who’s calling in was the target of the campaign and position materials for that agent to use during the call.”

But regardless, defining what that phase is, being able to define how you’re going to measure success, keeping the implementation cycle of that phase in a short time frame are all keys to success. And you paraphrased the right two right up front. You’ve got to have executive leadership buy-in, and that buy-in has got be there at all levels of the organization, both operationally and technologically. And you need to have folks with experience, have been there before that can help you avoid some common mistakes.

Paul Lewis:

Great. Tell us a little bit from the marketing perspective how are people in marketing leveraging CRM systems and processes today to deliver results that they couldn’t do in years past.

Mark Behrens:

Broad category functionality would fall under the marketing automation and campaign management capabilities that the enterprise CRM tools offer. And there are also tools that are focused specifically at those kinds of functions. So the ability now to design campaigns and to take purchase list data as well as your own internal data and perform analysis on that data to optimize your list purchasing, to optimize campaigns and then to measure campaign results is much higher than it has been in the past. That coupled with the analytical tools that are now available give marketing management real power tools to be able to go after and understand and optimize their campaigns.

Within the transactional environment, the ability to now tie those campaigns to the specific customer contacts and try to position messaging that’s consistent across the channels really makes a difference. So an example of that would be let’s say that I have sent out a direct mail campaign to my customer base encouraging them to contact us for an opportunity to upgrade to a new type of battery that I offer for my laptop, or to a new type of feature that I’m offering in a software program. With a CRM application that my agents use, and when integrated together with my contact technologies like voice and email and chat, I can now be able to identify that, ‘oh, this is Paul calling in. And Paul is someone that I sent that campaign to and he doesn’t have that new battery or that new software module yet.’ So I want to position a script for that agent who handles that contact with you to say, “Make sure that you serve Paul’s need first. But once you’ve done that ask him if he’d be interested in the opportunity to the upgrade to this new feature that we’re offering.” And then to be able to record the results of that.

With the integration that I’ve been describing the ability now to feed that back into an analytics tool and not only design better campaigns and optimize my list, but get much more effective and much more prompt measurement of the results, is a really powerful opportunity for marketing today.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah I think measurement is a huge thing, a huge buzzword that every marketer that I talk to talks about the increased responsibility to have hard metrics and be able to show data and CRM obviously is a great way to have some data. Tell me a little bit more about one of the things we talk to our customers a lot is the concept of having dialogues with their customers and how really if you’re going to blast the same message out regardless that that’s a monologue. Gathering the data and then saying, “Great, we’re going to send the exact same information we would have sent you anyway,” is really just an elaborate monologue. To have a dialogue you actually have to have forks in the road and change direction and change what you’re talking about. And you mentioned that a little bit about call-ins. Tell me a little bit about dialogue and how that might effect email or direct mail communication.

Mark Behrens:

So again I can use the information that’s available to me out of my both customer historical database and my transactional databases to identify customer value side notes, which is not a new idea anymore, and better understand my customer profiles and really start to pinpoint and personalize those messages. Whether it’s email, or in direct mailing, to be able to reflect and let you know that I understand who I’m talking to here and that we are familiar with you and that I remember our last conversation. So I know what it was that we last talked about, and I was thinking about that the other day, and I thought “You know it might be helpful Paul if you were aware that we can also offer this.” So I really can be almost conversational in the exchange of information back and forth.

And I can personalize that on the web, so that once I can identify who I’m talking with, I can then leverage a variety of resources to determine what kinds of messages I’d like to position back, and also your historical responses to those resources to determine - and those of others like you - to determine which are likely to have the most effect. Down to back in that old traditional customer call center environment instead of playing the same old message to every caller for one thing I can leverage my understanding of who’s calling in and the value of that caller to determine if then for how long you might be on hold, but to the extent that I have a busy period and I have to deal with hold messages. Let me provide targeted messages so that I’m offering campaign specific material to the customer while they’re on hold.

So if I already know that you have a particular product, let’s not play that recorded announcement. Let’s play a different one that plays to your specific profile. If I already know where you’re at in my customer life cycle, I can tune those messages, tune those scripts at the agent desktop. Again, pick more targeted mailing messages or more specific emails with a variety of links.

Another way that I can leverage the dialogue, if you will, and make sure that I’m really listening as well as talking to my customers, is integrating on the back end. It’s very common for us now to find in a contact center environment that our customers have deployed quality monitoring or 100 percent recording systems to be able to - as the recordings will tell us - monitor the call for training and quality purposes. Oftentimes though, the use of the tool stops there. And while I give a particular agent feedback about how a particular call went, what I’m not doing is looking at those resources as a real potential wealth of information for the marketing department to be able to hear the voice of the customer. And speech analytics tools now have really made that much more possible. So if I’m in an organization that’s already recording customer calls for training agents, I can take those recorded calls and mine them for phrases and references and customer opinions and feelings about my pricing, my products, my service. Start to feed that back. And then tie those to other services that I may already have. So if I have an independent customer survey process or a post-call survey process link and calibrate my call monitoring scores, that I provide to improve agent performance, to my speech analytics information, to my external survey, and feed all that back into marketing. As a tremendous and but currently often untapped opportunity for marketing folks in most organizations.

Paul Lewis:

Wow. That’s a lot of great information. A lot of good ideas of applying this new technology. Thinking about technology, obviously everything’s changing. Outside of those things you’ve mentioned, what are the current evolutions that are happening in the customer relationship management area and what are some of the top things that have come out in the last couple of years?

Mark Behrens:

Technology continues to change at a faster and faster rate. And similarly, we continue to work in an environment where acquisition and consolidation continues to be a fact of life. So one of the key areas for change is that some of the major players in the market have now changed names, and we have to look and continue to ask ourselves what direction those large vendors are going and whether it’s a direction that’s consistent with the direction that your company wants to move in. We’ve all seen over and over again that size is no guarantee of longevity any more than being the best breed is a guarantee of success. But marketing often wins the wars. So understanding who’s really dominating and having the most effective marketing campaigns can help you understand who’s likely to be the force in the market from the technologies you use as well.

Having said that, some of the key technological features that are affecting CRM packages now are all to the good. So service oriented architectures now are starting to come into reality and starting to deliver on some of their promises which should make it easier to overcome one of the major challenges for implementing CRM - which is the ability to integrate data across multiple applications and the ability to integrate data across multiple channels. Now, more so than it’s been in the past, it’s becoming easier and easier for me to have a consistent set of functions. Let’s say, for example, a function to capture name and address or a function to go determine customer value, and access that at the agent desktop, across the web or interactive voice response system. Use the same service or the same set of code in many different ways.

Another area of technology that’s emerging - I mentioned earlier that a very common use for CRM systems is the front end and simplify the agent environment in a call center - and there are some tools in place now that allow for that kind of integration much more quickly and less invasively than has been required in the past. So being able to get more out of a CRM system now, being able to get to that return on investment more quickly is possible. So there instead of in the old days where if we wanted to be able to integrate those 15 or 20 different applications into one, we would likely be talking about a multiyear, multiphase initiative. We now can see those timelines start to be trimmed down and shrunk. And so instead of looking at this being a three or four year path we may be looking at something more in the lines of 12 to 18 months. Same number of phases but the cycles will be shorter, and more functionality delivered in each phase, because it’s become easier to integrate those systems.

Another major change is voice over internet telephony that’s now becoming widely adopted and really starting to blur the line between channels and applications. So that I now no longer have to deal with my agent in a fixed call center being necessarily the primary point of contact for a customer. But I can virtualize the call center, not only across multiple physical locations with call center agents, but across departmental boundaries. So if I work in an environment where it’s really helpful to be able to leverage deep product knowledge but not practical to keep those people staff full time in a call center I can have those people easily reachable through internet, through voiceover internet telephony as essentially virtual call center agents when I need to reach out to touch them.

Paul Lewis:

Almost like an on demand feature.

Mark Behrens:

Exactly. Exactly. Or to be able to have better capacity and bridge the gap between a call center and a retail channel. Cause we’re starting to see now in a lot of the hardware and supply departments where really the answer to a customer’s question of do you have this in stock is only relevant if you have it in stock in his or her neighborhood. And the best person to answer that question is out on the retail floor. But I need to have an effective way of getting the question to that person and back so that I’m not making the person sit on hold or listen to a phone ring forever. So using those technologies to extend the call center out the folks who have the best knowledge, but people who it’s not practical to tether to a phone all the time. It’s a tremendous opportunity that’s real today.

Paul Lewis:

Mark, as we’re wrapping up today, could you just recap for us what you think you’re top three tips would be for improving the overall operational performance of CRM in business today?

Mark Behrens:

Absolutely. Starting from the top, I would say remember that CRM really is a strategy that you need to operationalize and support with technology - not just a technology. And strategy typically comes from the top in an organization. So getting the buy-in, change management direction from the highest executives that you can reach, and then making sure that that vision is shared at all levels that have to use the technology and that there is a vision for how you want to use technology to change the business and a set of measures for how you’ll determine if you’ve been successful at making that change. Those are really the second part of being successful.

And the third part is going there with folks that have been there before. Making sure you’ve got experience on your project team in implementing the kinds of CRM functionality that you’re trying to implement. Preferably in an industry or a function that’s similar to the one that you’re trying to change. And using the tools and technologies that you’re working with. In our experience those three things are key. And you’ll notice there that I didn’t mention a particular product or a particular technology. Cause at the end of the day it’s that vision and focus, the strategic orientation and the people behind it – both the ones who are gonna drive the change and the ones that bring the experience to make the change successful – that will over the challenges and limitations that exist in every technology.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more. Mark, I really want to thank you for being on the show today.

Mark Behrens:

Thank you. Appreciated the opportunity.

Paul Lewis:

If you’d like more information on TriSynergy Consulting you can visit them on the web at www.TriSynergyllc.com. As always, if you’d like more information on Internet Marketing Voodoo you can find us on the web at internetmarketingvoodoo.com. I’m your host Paul Lewis. Until next time keep it real.

Announcer:

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