A 2010 Strategy Roadmap for CRM, prt. 1

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2010 Strategy Roadmap for CRM, part 1.

Strategy is choice. Choice tied directly to Mission, Vision, Values, and Purpose. Choice, Selection, Focus and Differentiation are critical components to any successful strategy.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), is a strategy based on customer focus, on customer knowledge, and on delighting the customer. CRM is real-time, actionable, customer knowledge management. The best CRM approaches are holistic, involving all facets of your business and demonstrating accountability for results. CRM becomes a guiding philosophy and framework for doing business and includes:

• differentiating and optimizing the customer experience
• building customer knowledge to provide value to both the customer and your business
• taking a portfolio management approach to customers –investing in direct proportion to the expected return from each customer, while realizing that not every customer is worth keeping!
• delivering “value “ as defined by the customer - at each point in the customer’s lifecycle and with all of your customer contacts

The single most important set of decisions any business-to-business enterprise can make are those involving selection - of the products and services you will provide, of the customers for whom you will provide them, and of the channels through which you will market them, of the strategy to differentiate your offerings from your competitors.

Sadly, “something like 90% of companies fail to execute strategies effectively.” Often, the failure to realize a strategy success results from taking your eye off the ball. (In other words, something came up and we paid more attention to that blip than to the strategy). Successful strategy execution will/should allow your business to create a sustainable competitive advantage, to optimize its market-coverage models, to optimize its customer portfolio, to anticipate the shifting nature of value, and to realize loyal customers.

One primary constraint to successful execution of your strategy is that virtually every organization has limited resources: time, people, and resources. Choice, focus, and selection are critical. With today’s business intelligence tools, your firm can easily achieve Optimization of the marketplace coverage models - sales, customer service, marketing and channels. The models and tools of the eCRM practitioner provide almost a dot-to-dot like template with which to assure coverage optimization and hence optimal use of the firm’s limited resources.

A second realization we must still embrace is that no company can be all things to all people. Your customers represent a portfolio of assets that must be proactively managed in order to maximize shareholder and stakeholder value. As strategists we believe that our best customer investment and market strategy would be to invest our limited resources in direct proportion to the expected return on investment

Again, choice, selection, focus, and purpose must serve as constant monitors. While CRM “implementations” still fail – at disappointing level - to achieve what executives expect, It’s no longer a secret, the evidence is compelling and is well documented, both at the academic level and in practice. A strategy of Enterprise-wide Customer Relationship Management – when successfully implemented , whether in the clouds or on-premise- can achieve impressive results.

The most easily measurable results include:

· Increased sales Effectiveness and Efficiency

· Increased Customer/Employee Satisfaction

· Decreased cost-to-serve

In fact, there are 8 benefits. The EIGHT BENEFITS of successful CRM implementations are well documented. With a well-executed strategic CRM program, you can experience and measure:

1. Increased sales
2. Increased profitability
3. Greater product penetration
4. Growth in customer satisfaction and loyalty
5. Increased employee satisfaction
6. Decreased cost-to-serve
7. Increased retention of the existing customer base during times of economic uncertainty.
8. Increased likelihood of new customer acquisition

These maxims are independent of the enabling technology. Successful strategy implementation has more to do with aligning people, processes, and information (yes, data) to the mission/vision/values/ & purpose of the business, to the strategy, than with what software package or cloud-computing platform chosen.

Help! how do you talk to your Waldorf 8th grader about "Food, Inc."?

[As I sat and tried to collect a few thoughts before writing this posting, I began to wonder whether there is something of Horace's "The City Mouse and The Country Mouse" underlying the American debate about food and agriculture].

Last week my 8th grade Waldorf educated daughter, Isabella, and her class sat through Food, Inc. As it's viewing did for so many adult audiences, the movie hit a nerve with her and her classmates. And, as I try to sift through her questions and emotional reaction to the questions raised by the book, I am forced to re-examine certain questions and decisions I have made myself.

I had spent the last year researching the emotional fall-out, and rising criticism that has pummeled the GMO movement (Monsanto in particular), the poultry, cattle, and hog industries. I thought I could sit with my 13 year old and learn a lot from that conversation.

Her first 3 remarks were along the lines of "I'm never eating chicken again" and "why does Monsanto fight with farmers" and "what if Monsanto has it wrong"?

I have written about how destructive the rhetoric and "the noise of the special-interest groups", calling for a return to civility, for using "words that work", and for creating metaphors that move us towards civility once again. My personal library has grown to include numerous studies about seeds, the climate, soil use, tillage practices, and the future. Every author has an answer or a gripe, or some combination of both.

Sadly, I do not have "the answer".

Perhaps there is not one, single answer. In fact, how could there be just one answer!?

I have come to realize, however, that the underlying complexity of safe food production and of how American Agriculture feeds, clothes, and supplies the world is not as widely understood as we Americans need. Moreover, i've also come to realize that this subject matter: feeding and clothing the world safely - will only grow in importance as the planet races to embrace 9 Billion people by 2050. We need to talk about food production and future without all the rancor that controlled the health care debate.

To begin to grasp the complexity of the questions surrounding food production, safety, and availability, I encourage everyone to adopt Peter Senge's view of systems (c.f., Fifth Discipline) so as to begin to understand that whatever changes we make in one area necessarily have an impact on another area of the system.

Tonight is Jamie Oliver night at my house: my daughters' choice of programming!

So : what did you tell your teenager after s/he saw Food Inc. ?

Did, in fact, s/he see it? Did it cause a visceral reaction?

CRM: it still is not a package or cloud Solution!

Effective CRM initiatives have yielded a gold-mine of profits, customer information, and competitive advantage. Yet, even a decade and 1/2 after CRM entered our business vocabulary, fewer companies succeed than fail. The artistry, the magic in successful CRM and Customer Experience Management comes from your company's ability to transform the data into relevant and valuable information, and then to again turn that information into actionable knowledge - again relevant, timely, and of value at each point across the customer corridor - a value that changes with each transaction or touch.

Sadly, many CRM & CEM initiatives have failed to achieve the "results" or the ROI that the sponsoring executives were told to expect. More alarming to me, however, is the fact that Customer Relationship and Customer Experience Management initiatives are believed to be technology plays: technology or package or cloud-computing solutions.

The failure to achieve ROI or to have "expectations" met could in fact be a result of failing to realize that CRM is not a package solution!

Loyalty-based, Customer Relationship Management is a strategy based on customer focus, on customer knowledge, and on delighting the customer. CRM is real-time, actionable, customer knowledge management. The best CRM approaches are holistic, involving all facets of your business and demonstrating accountability for results. CRM becomes a guiding philosophy and framework for doing business.

Successful CRM practitioners anchor the initiative in their strategy, as well as in their mission, vision and values not in the package, or point-, solution they choose.

Market-at-risk Analysis

The Quality movement in the US came to the forefront in the mid-80's. Satisfaction and loyalty became the next banners brought into the battle. Today it appears as though satisfaction and loyalty have slipped to a lower focus of attention. Corporate social responsibility, corporate reputation, and customer experience management are more "top-of-mind" than at any time in my career.
Yes, customer satisfaction is still important. In fact a new "standard" for reporting satisfaction has emerged. Borne from Fred Reichheld's ground-breaking studies while at Harvard, Net Promoter can be a powerful tool and quite a number of firms have chosen Net Promoter as their scoring mechanism.

If you want to find out exactly where to concentrate your efforts to improve and or fix issues ready to your company's product, delivery, and service issues: Market-at-risk analysis is the way to go!
Developed by John Goodman and brought to the marketplace and placed under its scrutiny and spot-light by TARP (quality firm, not asset relief), Market-at-risk analysis allows your firm to stack rank the 10 or so top reasons why customers will not buy from you or why they won't refer or why they will DEFECT as soon as they can.
Stack ranking by economic impact caused to your business : fix it and win big!