CRM deployment Pitfalls and Choices

Introduction

All the organizations, globally, have historically deployed one or the other form of a customer relationship management tool. In the late nineties, the buzz word was ERP or enterprise resource planning and how it can change the very way organizations function and how it could improve revenues for the customer. This was followed by CRM or customer relationship management in the early twenty first century. All the CRM application promised that they would help organizations manage their customers better, manage all the customer facing processes better and in turn increase revenue. However, now in the second decade of the twenty first century, most organizations are realizing that not all of the above materialized for them.

 

Why did this happen?

Why most CRM deployments resulted in failure is because of multiple aspects the main one’s are listed below:

1. Running a CRM project like an IT project: In the nascent stage of CRM, organizations could not distinguish between an IT application and a business application. CRM is an application which directly impacts revenue and successful projects are those where the entire lifecycle of the application is controlled by the business.
2. A requirement based approach rather than a process based approach: CRM is built around processes. Giving individual requirements leads to unnecessary customizations and it also leads to looking at a small picture rather than the overall picture which is critical for the success of the project.
3. Choosing the wrong tool for the job: This again is directly related to the first point. The lack of involvement of the business in the decision making process and the evaluation process leads directly to choosing an application or modules of an application incorrectly, which leads to heavy customization and in turn to a sluggish white elephant which does not deliver.
4. No in house skills: Heavy dependence on the vendor or a systems integrator lead to unnecessary development activities and unnecessary cost overruns. Most of the systems integrator resources rarely understand the business and instead develop an application as if developing a new application, which simply does not work with off the shelf products.
5. The “me too” game: A lot of organizations went for CRM application because their competitors went for it. However the organizations themselves were not ready to deploy any kind of CRM tool.

 

What was the end result?

The points mentioned in the previous section led to the following cases:

1. Incorrect CRM tool: All CRM applications have strengths and weaknesses. Organizations with incorrect CRM tools have spent so much on the deployment, they are in a position where they are hesitant to change over or do the same exercise again.
2. Scrapped Projects: After spending millions of dollars in licenses, the organizations scrapped their entire CRM project because it either took too long to deploy or multiple vendors came in and did not do a good job of it, leading to unnecessary cost over runs.
3. Working on prior releases: Because of the fact that it took too long to deploy the CRM and making it stable, finally, customers are hesitant to go through the effort again.
4. Frustrated Organizations: Went back to working their original ways, despite having a CRM application in place. The end result being that the entire investment is a dead investment.

What tool is right for me?

Before we get to the point of what tool is right for me, we need to realize if the organization itself is ready for CRM or not.  The successful CRM projects are those where organizations have changed their processes to match the inherent processes of the application itself and then tweaked the application minimally to match some of their processes which are not available. It is important to understand that CRM is an attitude, it is not just another application or another tool.

With the plethora of CRM applications around it is hard for an organization to choose the right application. The time spent on this will decide the future outcome of the project. I have come across organizations spending millions on an application like Siebel from Oracle only to use rudimentary, sales, service and marketing functionalities. Something which could have easily been achieved by CRM applications like Sales Force or even Sugar CRM at a fraction of the cost.

The evaluation of the tools comes to 4 basic questions:

1. Do I have my processes documented?
2. Which of these processes do I need to automate?
3. What is the timeline in which I need to automate these processes?
4. Are there any laws governing storage of this data?

 

The answers to the above questions will give you an accurate representation of the kind of application which you should be looking at. As an extremely simplified example let us take a case of two greenfield telecommunications companies operating in different locations globally.

Company A Brief:

• Operates from Continental Europe.
• Has documented the Sales, Service and the marketing processes.
• Has a timeline of 3 months.
• Wants to establish a customer database and deploy only the service and marketing processes i.e any process involving subscriber acquisition and retention.
• Customer data needs to be stored somewhere in continental Europe.

Company B Brief:

• Operates from India.
• Has documented Sales, Service, Marketing, Product, Orders and Asset Management processes.
• Has a timeline of 1 year.
• Wants to go live with all the processes on an enterprise CRM.
• Subscriber must be store in a company owned data center in India as required by Law (As of 2010)

 

If we take the case of company A, the time to market is extremely low hence a quick deployment is warranted. Secondly the company wants to deploy only the service and the marketing processes to target acquisition and retention of new subscribers. Thirdly the data can be stored in any data center. Given this the ideal CRM for this organization would be a cloud based CRM like Salesforce. The reason for this being the following:

1. Extremely quick to deploy with successful implementations.
2. Cloud based CRM with data centers in Europe.
3. Standard service and marketing functionality available with little or no tweaking to the application required.

 

However in the case of Company B, the time to market is fairly relaxed.  The processes, particularly the Products, Orders and asset management are extremely complex.  The data must be stored in a company owned data center.  This limits the choice of CRM to enterprise CRM applications like Siebel or Microsoft Dynamics.

Irrespective of the choice of the application some rudimentary rules must be followed for any CRM deployment:

1. The organization must become CRM ready as in the business group must decide and finalize the processes involved, specific and cross functional.
2. After choosing the CRM, the correct modules required must be chosen. All vendors will try to maximize the sale, the choice however is always dependent on the organization.
3. If the organization is not using internal resources the systems integrator must match the organizations ideology. A lot of very expensive CRM projects have failed because if this one rule.
4. Architecture of the overall application infrastructure. CRM, even if only basic processes are deployed can exist as a standalone system. It must be integrated with other applications. At the bare minimum it will definitely need to be integrated with some kind of an analytical application.

 

Final Words

As mentioned earlier, CRM is an attitude and process driven. The correct approach to deploying it would mean the difference between a successful implementation and a lot of heartache.