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  The Use and Abuse of Customer Management Systems
 
Ask the Managing Director or the Financial Director how many people work for the company or what the annual revenues are and you'll almost certainly get the right answer. But ask them both how many customers they have and you'll probably get two different answers.
 
Astonishingly, in the vast majority of companies, questions about customers will leave senior executives sitting in embarrassed silence. Business managers often do not know how their organisation acquired its customers, what quality of relationship their company has with them, or whether the customers are profitable. And they cannot relate those different pieces of information to one another.
 
So what is the problem? The key is integration. Information may be available about this department or that area of operations, but linking disparate sources of information together with the tools to show what is happening on the macro and micro level, is what the executive still lacks. If that seems to be stating the obvious, why is it that this degree of integration is not readily available at the MD's fingertips? The reason is that it is not simply just a question of systems - this problem must be tackled on three interrelated levels.
 
The first level is broadly concerned with processes: what should, or could, be known about your customers and how to serve them. The second area is concerned with the people that serve customers - your sales team. And the third area is about the technology itself, notably whether the IT systems that claim to manage customer information and therefore relationships, actually work for your business?
 
INTEGRATED CRM
Take the first level - what should you know about your customers? What this means in practice is whether you can tell if a marketing or sales campaign is profitable - not just money well spent - but profitable. Alternatively, can you spot long sales cycles for different customers or products that might reveal something about unprofitable activities? Or again, can you ask about matters such as credit control, to identify customer black spots?
 
These are the kinds of questions that are not easily answered if the different processes that serve customers are not integrated. Too many companies are relying on 'interfacing' technologies. This means that a system might be good at managing direct marketing campaigns or logging prospective leads, but it stops the minute a sale is made. Therefore, it cannot link with the financial systems that hold the transactional information against which profitability can be assessed. And so, the profitable management of customers is stopped in its tracks. Also, if the sales information is not available to the CRM system, how can you build sales campaigns based on specific products and services bought or not bought by your customers?
 
Alternatively, if processes are not integrated it might hinder employee collaboration. For example, can they share diaries in real time and on the move, or remind others to make calls? And watch out, for whilst many remote or mobile Customer Relationship Management systems will synchronise with the office when plugged in at the end of the day, this is often not good enough, since customers cannot be answered immediately and staff then get double-booked. All too often, a remote worker will schedule an appointment when they are on the road, only to find that a colleague in the office has already arranged a meeting on the same day, at the same time.
 
DO SALES-STAFF USE CRM SYSTEMS?
The biggest killer of Customer Relationship Management systems is inconvenience: if technology does not make the job of salespeople easier, they simply do not use it.
 
It is no secret that sales personnel tend to be a breed apart - which is why they are good at their job. However, being focussed on sales can bring its drawbacks: sales-people often loathe bureaucracy or prioritise customer-facing activities, both of which can compromise the effective use of technology. It is imperative that CRM systems fit tightly with the way salespeople prefer to operate. So again, it is a question of real-time integration, this time at the interface between the individual and the computer.
 
For example, CRM applications may simply ask too many questions, ostensibly to gather as much information about an engagement as possible, but causing sales personnel to avoid it altogether. Alternatively, if the system insists on questions being answered by choosing from various options, an irritated salesperson may actually just fill in the blanks with the first option on the list. The information gathered will then be incorrect, yet other staff may believe it to be valid and will probably use this data to drive business decisions. Or again, take email. Many interactions with customers take place via email. But if your staff spend hours searching through email inboxes or have to wait until they get back to the office in order to search through some centralised store of emails because they do not have mobile access to the data, then the customer relationship may well be spoilt.
 
LESS MIGHT MEAN MORE
The third level of integration is linked directly to the IT systems themselves. For example, is your system suited to the kind of business you are supporting and the size of the deals you are winning? Alternatively, if your business plan is based upon direct marketing, you will need to know about conversion rates, or if you depend upon one-off campaigns you will need to know what new or hidden opportunities lie in front of you for cross selling and up-selling? Of course, all Customer Relationship Management systems will claim to be able to interface disparate data sources and do the analysis to provide this information, but if they can't do it easily, campaigns that should be done will probably fail to get off the ground.
 
Again, we might add a point about the effectiveness of being able to do some of this analysis remotely. The salesperson that has mobile access, can have cross or up-selling opportunities presented to them there and then.
 
What can we learn from these 'pain points'? Our conclusions may be counter- intuitive, but perhaps, for example, less data more fully integrated can in fact mean more customer knowledge. Proper integration involves a single source of data, ranged across all functions of the business, from marketing and sales, through logistics and accounts, to after-sales. Analysis of data often involves matching information from several of these areas simultaneously, which pretty much rules out separate applications. Make sure that the application you choose matches the sales process of your company and is simple enough to use quickly while providing all the key sales and profitability measures - keep your ambitions to achievable levels in this area.
 
And finally, install systems that can be used in practice. This involves ensuring the software is fast enough in all practical environments (whether local, multi-office, remote or from home), and can be interfaced with other technologies such as switchboards where necessary. That way real opportunities will materialise and profits will be ensured, from highly productive customer information. If all management is seen to be involved with and knowledgeable about the customers of the business, then there is the strongest possible likelihood that their importance, or more precisely the importance of the revenue and cash-flow that they generate, will be seen, realised and appreciated by the entire company. The alternative is to let your competitors do this first!