"Companies typically deploy their CRM systems by business unit or functional department. This approach, unfortunately, leaves islands of sales leads and service requests isolated from the corporate information flow because companies rarely link these different systems."

Sadly, after spending as much as millions of dollars on CRM, too many companies are not taking the 'free' step of re-engineering their people and processes so as to take full advantage of the new technology. Agarwal et al suggest that is purely for cultural reasons, as existing fiefdoms may be difficult to overcome.

This seems to argue for high-level executive sponsorship of CRM, which could overcome the department-level disconnections, feuds, and lethargies that prevent companies from getting the maximum possible ROI.

For companies that do make an enterprise-wide, connected commitment to CRM, there are plenty of rewards for what ends up being little or no additional investment. Here are examples from McKinsey:

*"Improving a company's case-management capabilities through relatively modest changes in processes, technology, and organisation can increase cross-channel revenues by 10 to 20 percent while reducing customer churn by 5 to 10 percent."

*"One telecommunications company was getting 11 percent of its new service sales (representing more than 3 percent of its total revenue) online. Better case management in its CRM systems helped it generate an additional 3 percent of its revenue through follow-up sales. Similar gains might well be possible for other telcos."

*"A financial-services institution became one of the best in its market at cross-selling products among service lines by implementing a case-management system that passed 500,000 high-value leads a year across several different sales and service systems."

*"About 5,000,000 unique consumers visited [a wireless] company's Web site every month. Of these, about 10,000 purchased mobile phones during their visits, so the Web site was a significant source of sales but failed to tap two opportunities. First, about 27,000 customers a month began a purchase on the Web site but abandoned their shopping carts before finishing. The new case-management system collected this customer information and passed it along to sales teams, which followed up and brought in an additional 8,000 subscribers a month. Second, more than 20 percent of the visitors who did not initiate a purchase nonetheless did leave contact information....The information about them was sent to marketing for mass campaigns (e-mail, direct mail, and outbound calling), which added an additional 35,000 new subscribers a month to the company's sales. These success rates far exceeded those of other mass campaigns."

"One telco upgraded its case-management program so that it could track complaints more easily across units. Combined with new training and employee incentives, the upgrades helped the company reduce the level of problems requiring more than three touches to less than 5 percent, from more than 30 percent. That improvement cut customer service costs by 24 percent and increased customer retention."

It is important to note that all of these were easy fixes, with the technology either pre-existing or rleatively cheap to add. The only difficulty was to summon the executive will to connect the systems. With benefits like the ones McKinsey describes, it seems to be a sure bet that more enterprises with investments in CRM will see the logic behind connecting systems, people, and processes.

For more information visit the CRM Research Pavilion for exhibits, case studies, white papers and downloads from a range of New Zealand’s leading CRM vendors.

October 2006

Courtesy of: www.Line56.com