01.22.04
 By
Sharon Drew Morgen
For many centuries, companies used to believe that their customers
were those who purchased the product. Lately, it has become apparent
that there are several types of customers. There are those who purchase
our products, those who manufacture our products, those who sell our
products, and those who manage everyone else. In other words, all
people who touch us and our businesses are our customers.
When CRM was developed, it was meant to fix the age-old problem that
has been inherent in the sales field since the serpent convinced Eve
to eat the apple: how do you manage your relationship with customers.
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But
what does ‘managing a relationship’ mean? For me it means taking responsibility
to ensure that collaborative decisions get made, that everyone is
doing the best they can do together and communicating through the
rough spots, and that everyone is relatively happy. But in technology
terms, Relationship Management has developed into an enhanced form
of data gathering. Know data about your customer, the thinking goes,
and it will be easier to create a lasting relationship (through knowing
data?) and somehow sales people will grow more sales.
Somewhere between the dot com era and the dot bomb bust, we all got
the idea that technology would solve our problems. But the problems
really started when companies began replacing people – sales people
– with technology. In some multinationals, 30% of sales jobs were
disposed of and replaced with technology.
But where is the Customer in all this? Being tracked and forecasted,
analyzed and managed. And how, exactly, does the customer end up making
a buying decision because she’s been tracked?
THE COST OF SOFTWARE
Industry intelligence claims that for every dollar spent on CRM, another
$5 dollars is spent cleaning up the mess it causes. That’s huge. I
wonder if customers know that before they purchase. But the word is
out: CRM implementation is a problem. And possibly, a problem so big
it might not be worth the solution.
Siebel, after hearing years of complaints about the total cost of
implementation, has just added a front end to their CRM-On Demand.
Called the Up-Shot edition, this new piece of software “now offers
functionality to support customer requests, issue resolution, and
other postsales activities, and all these additions are available
at no additional cost.” (CRM Product Review, 12/5/03).
I’m wondering how customers will actually get heard better with the
product. In fact, I’d like to take a long, hard look at who the customer
really is here.
Let’s track the range of customers for a CRM product. Ostensibly,
the real customer for a CRM product is the sales force – Customer
1. But before they can use the system, the technology folks – Customer
2 – need to manage the system and integrate it into the existing technology
used by the company. And somehow, the entire process has to be managed
– Customer 3 – so that the managers, users, and techies all work collaboratively
to end up with a usable – and used – system.
But that’s not the end of the story. Managers must manage the implementation,
make sure the sales force not only knows how to use the CRM system,
but wants to use it. The number of CRM systems introduced into a company
without the agreement of the users is staggering – and difficult to
manage as a result.
So, looking at the true customers of the CRM system, we’ve got several
types of job descriptions - and no one is managing their relationships.
MANAGING THE RELATIONSHIP
When software gets purchased in a company, the tech team has a great
deal of work to do. Not only must they integrate all of the technology
and have existing systems continue to run without a hitch, but they
must make sure that the users are happy. That, in itself, is a Herculean
task, since most of the users don’t know what they want in a system
they didn’t ask for.
Enter the managers. Somehow, the line managers have to mitigate the
distance between the techies and the users. So you’ve got disgruntled
users, annoyed techies, and frantic managers, all trying to solve
problems they’ve never handled before with each other.
Indeed, I’ve heard of few, if any, companies who believe it’s their
responsibility to keep their employees happy while implementing the
technology - to hear their needs, their ideas, their fears; to teach
them how to work collaboratively with all the other groups and teams
whose jobs will be effected by the technology; to change direction
or initiatives because some of the folks are unhappy or need more
time or want to make changes.
Specifically we forget that the techies and management and users all
need to collaborate – and none of the groups has a similar job description
or set of goals or vocabulary. We all know of several well-documented
situations in which large companies lost millions because they didn’t
know how to have the technical people collaborate with the management
people.
Technical folks, management people, and users all have different goals,
outcomes, functions, capabilities, jobs – and we’re asking them to
work together without making them one work unit, without teaching
them how to have a unified vocabulary and mission, without helping
them add new criteria to their job descriptions so they want to get
up each morning and do their best.
So before we move forward with our technology, before we offer or
create systems that will further forecast, or answer questions – the
doing part of an implementation – let’s make sure we’ve managed the
relationships that make the technology work: let’s manage the human
relationships of our true customers.
About the Author:
Sharon Drew Morgen, author of NYTimes Bestseller Selling with Integrity,
teaches collaborative partnering through her Decision Facilitation
process.
Read
this newsletter at: http://www.crmnewz.com/2004/0122.html |
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