CRM is an enterprise wide initiative. It requires
that all areas of the organization work toward the common goal of building
stronger customer relationships. Often this means change in organizational
structure to support your CRM goals. Ask yourself the following questions
to evaluate if your company is organized to foster and support customer
relationships.
1. Is senior management tasked with ensuring that the
organization understands and is meeting customers' needs? Are they responsible
for ensuring that the CRM vision and goals are understood throughout the
organization?
2. Is management accountable for the profit and loss
of customer performance, and responsible for measuring and monitoring
customer performance? CRM is difficult to implement and requires strong
leadership and ongoing commitment.
3. Are customer relationship responsibilities clearly
defined, assigned, and understood, and are results measured and rewarded?
Classic organizational theory has taught us that individuals in a business
environment will focus on both what is measured and what is compensated.
Modifying the business focus and organization structure and installing
new systems will have little or no impact if performance and compensation
processes are not addressed.
4. Are customer-centric performance standards established
and monitored at all customer touch points? Acquisition of profitable
customers, retention of profitable customers, further penetration of customers
through cross-sell efforts, and reactivation of valuable customers through
win-back campaigns are all meaningful measures of employee performance.
The key for many organizations is the ability to consistently measure
these activities across the organization.
5. Does your organization view all customer communications
as important, and manage them so they are consistently superior, and relevant
to the customer?
6. Are policies and procedures that are critical to
managing customer relationships well documented and consistent across
your customer touch points?
7. Are customer-critical functions staffed with well-trained,
motivated employees? Staff training is crucial to the success of any CRM
initiative. Announcing a new focus on the customer will not be sufficient
to change the behavior of most employees. The organization will require
ongoing training initiatives focused on: CRM vision, strategies and goals,
individual and group roles and responsibilities for CRM, adoption of new
systems, and customer needs.
8. Is employee performance measured and rewarded based
on meeting customer needs and on successfully serving the customer? Most
employees are brought into the organization and/or trained for specific
functional tasks, from accounting to inventory management, from product
development to sales. These functional tasks are typically well defined
and relate to the creation, delivery, and measurement of an organization’s
product offerings. Therefore, the concept of understanding and meeting
customers' needs is key to an organizations' future livelihood, and therefore
it deserves focus.
9. Does your organization have the sales and marketing
expertise and resources to succeed in CRM?
10. Does your organization have the service resources
and excellence to succeed in CRM?
11. Does the organization have the technical expertise
and resources to succeed in CRM?
12. Are there employee-training programs designed to
develop the skills required for acquiring and deepening customer relationships?
In addition to any necessary functional training, employees should be
provided with the understanding of how their jobs fit into the broader
scope of CRM within the organization.
Adapted from The Customer Differential by Melinda
Nykamp (AMACOM, 2001).
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