Staying Ahead of the CRM Curve - CIO Special Advertising Supplement

CIO SPECIAL ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT

Getting There from Here

SECTIONS
Staying Ahead of the CRM Curve

Making Customer Information Work for You

Channeling and Campaigning: Front Office Challenges

e-CRM: What the Web's Got to Do with It

Closing the CRM Loop

The Outsourcing Alternative

Getting There from Here

Researchers tell us that CRM implementation failure rates are a gut-clenching 55 to 75 percent. Here are some ideas to help you stay in the minority...

    It takes an enterprise to develop a successful customer relationship management strategy. Whether the CIO or a business executive makes the final choice about how to proceed, what to buy and who to hire, he or she cannot succeed alone.
    Since every part of the enterprise will be affected by CRM decisions, for good or for ill, then sooner or later every part of the enterprise will have the opportunity to support it or sabotage it. So start by building a team and practice your cheerleading skills.
    After that, consider paying attention to this best-practices checklist:

Understand your company's customer relationship issues
Many companies fail to pinpoint simple customer-relations problems. To get a handle on yours, begin with a couple of audits:

Conduct a customer interaction audit. Map all customer interaction points and types: sales calls, billing, service, advertising, etc., and associate costs and revenues with each. Chances are you'll start to spot customer interactions that help, by leading to orders, upgrades and so on, and those that hurt, like returns, complaints, write-offs.
Conduct a customer information audit. Have you got the tools you need to gather, extract and analyze customer data? Is data being duplicated? Are replications of data being separately managed to the point where copies of the same data are no longer the same?

U R Linked
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Make sure your infrastructure is ready for CRM
CRM implementations can seriously impact your IT infrastructure, especially your network, so you need to make sure it can handle what's coming. Pay attention to:

Data mining. Got demand for e-CRM? Then beware-data mining for recommendations in real time generates lots of network traffic. You'll be measuring data volumes in gigabytes and terabytes.
Servers and firewalls. A successful Web site with lots of customers results in traffic behind the firewall that can suck up bandwidth when, say, a personalization module outside the firewall interacts with an application server or a datamart behind the firewall. Make sure your firewall and the CRM apps you choose get along and consider using stateless servers to host CRM apps so you can replicate them to increase capacity.
ERP. There's a limit to your ERP system's capacity. A system like SAP's, for instance, will likely max out in the vicinity of 2,000 concurrent users, so if you've got 8,000 customers online at the same time, you've got a problem. Decide which apps really need realtime interaction and which can cope in batch mode.
Wireless and remote access. If you've got mobile and remote CRM users, you'll face bandwidth, synchronization and application client issues. You'll also want to avoid burdening mobile and remote users with complex access procedures, so incorporate end-to-end security technology.
Staying in synch. When sales people use narrowband dial-up connections, it can be tough to keep local databases in synch with those on the network. If synchronization sessions take too long, remote users won't call in when they should.

Start with a steering committee
Enterprisewide CRM involves multiple departments and lines of business, so support for the effort has to be broad.
"CIOs must make sure any CRM project is driven by business users," observes Larry Marion, editor-in-chief at MASG.com. "The managers of sales, marketing, customer service and support and new business development must be tightly aligned behind the CRM project. Then a CIO must consider the corporate culture. Some organizations are decentralized; each department or unit makes its own technology decisions. In decentralized organizations, the merits of a complete CRM solution that combines front end collaboration with back end analytics will not be accepted.
"The best way for a CIO to create a complete CRM solution, in the context of the corporate culture and needs of the operating managers, is to first develop a business systems architecture," Marion says. "This vision of where the company is headed, and the standards it'll use to incorporate the necessary tools to support those business goals, will describe how to implement a complete solution-if that's the direction chosen by the business unit heads."

Effective eService through Knowledge Management at University of Utah Hospital & Clinic

Faced with increasing demand and complexity in their support environment, members of the customer services team at the University of Utah Hospital & Clinics needed centralized, reusable IT support solutions. Today, ServiceWare Technologies is helping the university hospital build a knowledge base that works within the existing support processes to decrease call lengths, improve the quality of the support experience and shorten training cycles.
    More than 5,000 physicians, administrative staff and medical students rely on the team's 20 support analysts, who field an average of 1,300-1,600 inquiries per week. The rest of the team is dispatched to handle onsite service to systems running in an array of different operating environments. A key challenge at the support center is the diversity and number of applications-including some "home-grown"-running much of the patient-care equipment.
    Without a centralized resource of answers, agents weren't fully equipped for problem resolution, the true barometer of support effectiveness and satisfaction.

Reaping Rewards of an Integrated eService Solution
University of Utah turned to ServiceWare, whose Web-based eService Suite enables companies to provide fast and accurate answers to inquiries across multiple communication channels. The solution has enabled agents to build a customizable knowledge base and easily access a vast repository of problems and solutions to the most common desktop problems-as well as issues specific to the medical environment or healthcare applications.
    University of Utah is already reaping the rewards of an integrated eService solution. Not only has the length of call times decreased, the quality of calls has improved. Additionally, the solution has contributed to a reduction in training time-now even the most junior support agent can quickly handle as many inquiries as veterans.
    "We can look back and evaluate not only how long it takes our analysts to get to the right answer, but their overall effectiveness in responding to inquiries," reports University team leader Michele Mills. "In an age when high turn-over in IT staff is commonplace, the ability for us to tap into the knowledge base of our service team-and record that information for future use-is critical."
    For more information on the eService Suite, visit http://www.serviceware.com/

Since numerous issues will cross departmental and functional lines, they should be addressed by a committee comprised of senior managers from these interest groups, as well as your systems integrator. And, of course, the effort should be backed by top execs, since implementing CRM is expensive, typically $500,000 to $3 million for the software. High-end packages often cost as much as $5 million.

Be able to show how this CRM design and implementation supports your company's vision
As your business becomes customer-centric, CRM is the fulcrum on which its future is leveraged. So you need to make sure that what you're creating delivers in customer-centric, not product-centric, terms: improving customer relations, increasing per-customer value and attracting and keeping more customers. Stay focused on your business and on a disciplined and structured marketing process driven by detailed data; don't get distracted by the technology.
"It is impossible to recommend technologies without an understanding of the business requirements, the functional/operational structure of the business, and the competitive imperatives the organization is facing," says Kevin Rosen, CRM practice leader at Silverline Technologies. "I recommend conducting a business assessment in which the CRM vision and goals are clearly defined, your customer model and best practices are documented, and a CRM blueprint and benefits case are created."

Involve end-users from the outset
To avoid painful surprises, it's imperative that your CRM users are made part of the implementation team and are invited into the decision-making process at the beginning of the project.

Consider teaming with a systems integrator
Getting help from an experienced integrators who understands the many CRM technologies and can fit them to the needs of your enterprise can make the difference between success and failure.

Application Service Provider Delivers Capital Service

DaimlerChrysler Capital Services (debis), a DaimlerChrysler services company, manages an $8.5 billion asset portfolio. Headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, the global company provides financing for aircraft, helicopters, marine vessels, commercial real estate, construction and industrial equipment.
    When its financial systems and IT support moved to Southfield, Michigan after the DaimlerChrysler merger, DaimlerChrysler Capital Services needed to establish itself as an independent entity.
    "We are rapidly expanding our global business lines and processes; so we wanted a new business model that would help us accelerate quickly and keep up with both market and operational demands," says Clarence Bastarache, CIO, DaimlerChrysler Capital Services.
    The company wanted the benefits of mySAP.com enterprise resource planning applications and needed a solution that eliminated time-consuming systems maintenance. Additionally it was important for DaimlerChrysler Capital Services to be able to predict IT costs. As a result they sought a solutions partner with a proven track record offering quality customer service, certification, expertise in SAP, and who could be relied on to support them into the future. Qwest Cyber.Solutions (QCS) met these criteria, according to Vic Inglese, global project manager, DaimlerChrysler Capital Services.

Predefined Services Provides Significant Savings
To implement the SAP solution internally would have required DaimlerChrysler Capital Services to add new IS employees to install and maintain the application and operate a data center that would need to run 24/7. According to Inglese, QCS delivers these capabilities without a substantial investment in infrastructure and personnel.
    "We're getting predefined services from QCS which provides a significant savings each year. And, we don't worry about turnover or training," says Inglese. DaimlerChrysler Capital Services can add systems users and functionality as needed, and the company expects the savings to continue to increase.
    "We are converting our key people-our internal customers-from very manual, labor intensive tasks into a streamlined integrated environment with global information access. With SAP, supported by QCS, we will have critical information at our fingertips. With better data, we make better business decisions. That's the bottom line," concludes Inglese.

About QCS' Solutions
The QCS Enterprise Freedom^TM products offer a simple, powerful solution with rapid activation, a single point of contact and simple monthly billing.
    Applications are hosted in Qwest's sophisticated state-of-the-art Cyber Centers and are delivered over the optically linked, secure Internet communications fiber network.
    For more information, visit http://www.qcs-us.com/.

Make a detailed plan
It should involve all aspects of the job, including processes, technologies and people (chain of command). Answering these questions will help:

What do we mean by "customer"?
What kinds and how many processors will we need?
What applications will we incorporate and how will we integrate them?
How will we store, analyze and distribute data?
If you are going to utilize the Web, what kind of Web traffic will the network get?
What security considerations need to be made?

Also, be prepared to develop a formal return-on-investment plan, which your CFO will probably want.

Define a change process
Without a defined process for changing the project's scope, approach or plan details, the odds of failure skyrocket.
Maintain a log that records any proposed changes, who or what drove them (user demands, unforeseen implementation problems, etc.). Establish a mechanism for determining whether changes incur additional charges. Also define escalation procedure so problems can be elevated to appropriate decision makers.

Implement in phases
Chances are you'll implement in stages rather than all at once. This approach helps keep a project manageable, and resources are easier to get and manage. What's more, if your plan is well-structured, you'll see benefits faster. Your enterprise can be getting return on its earlier investments while later stages are still underway. And, of course, your company will be able to reassess what was accomplished versus what was hoped for and make modifications along the way.

Monitor performance
If you aren't watching, you'll never know if your CRM system is measuring up.
You'll know success when you see it: higher profitability, increased customer value, greater customer retention and a growing customer base.

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