IT: Focus, Traceability and Visibility	Return to Upshot home page

Look closely in any organization's information technology (IT) systems, and it's likely you'll see more information about customers and transactions being collected and managed than ever before. It's the critical fuel that drives business decisions. That's one reason there has been such heavy investments in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems over the past several years.

In today's tightening economy, however, organizations have to look critically at how their CRM systems operate, and where they can make improvements to ensure a return on their sizable investments in people, process re-engineering, and the technology itself.

Improving your own CRM doesn't have to be overwhelming. Focusing on fundamentals of CRM best practices can help you start a CRM project, or bring an existing initiative back on track.

The Holy Grail of CRM is to fully understand all customer "touch points" within your organization. In order to get this global picture, you need to combine all your data sources to get as close as you can to an "enterprise view" of each customer. View Related Solutions

Start with the basics
If you're just starting a project, or even if you need to re-focus one, a great place to start is to identify and develop your business objectives for the project. Oftentimes, this means involving the right people to identify exactly what CRM means to your organization. It's also an opportune time to secure or validate that you have executive sponsorship for such an initiative as well.

And, don't attempt to bite off more than you can chew. Identify a pilot project and set attainable goals. Small successes that identify areas where you can show measurable returns on investments can quickly promote corporate-wide support of your CRM project going forward.

Understand that CRM is all about data
Bad data leads to bad business decisions, so it's easy to understand that the quality of what you put into your CRM system determines what you're likely to get out of it.

To get a handle on the quality of your data, it's best to start with an assessment of what it is you have and what you are collecting. According to Gartner, Inc., a leading technology research firm, at least 50 percent of enterprises undertaking a CRM strategy are unaware of data quality problems in their environment. That's why it's so important to continually measure and report on data quality metrics. You can't fix a problem if you don't know it exists.

Once you have a general understanding about what you have, it's a good idea to establish processes and plug in tools to help "clean" any data you already have, and prevent any new "bad" data from reaching your CRM system. For some areas of your operation, cleansing is needed on a transactional basis. Other types of data, such as existing databases or prospect marketing lists, are most effectively cleansed or processed all at once, as a batch. Whether you choose a major vendor to supply your CRM infrastructure, or build one yourself, you can even find tools that plug directly into your systems to perform the cleansing process.

Create a single customer view
The Holy Grail of CRM is to fully understand all of the customer "touch points" within your organization. In order to get this global picture, you need to combine all your data sources to get as close as you can to an "enterprise view" of each customer.

While the basic information contained in separate database is essentially the same, the format of each may differ. That's why focusing on the quality of your data is so critical. By utilizing technology, information can be normalized and corrected before it is loaded into the CRM system — whether you collect or store customer name and address data, email addresses, point-of-sale data, or any other type of business data.

Make CRM a journey
CRM is a continuous process, not a one-time fix. Information about customers becomes dated as people move, get married, or even have children. Businesses relocate and new people are hired that become the contacts in your data stores. Even things as mundane as changes in postal codes can compromise the quality of your information.

Remember that the main principle is the "R" in CRM — building relationships with your customers. By practicing some fundamentals in your business processes — and cleaning and managing the data that feeds your processes at every opportunity — success is well within your reach!

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