Factors driving selection of the CRM Application
The factors that determine the maturity of the CRM application vary from business to business and hence a fully mature application for one customer may prove to be useless for the other because it is not tailored to suit to its needs. Thus CRM Maturity is not just dependent on the CRM Product but also in the way it has been configured to suit to customers business needs.
· Business Processes: The CRM Application should follow Industry wide accepted business processes tailored to its business requirements with minimal bottlenecks. In-built alternate workflows should be provided in the application to cater to bottleneck situations, rejections and manual fall outs.
· Best Practices Implemented: The CRM application should be designed/configured in such a way that it implements some of the best practices followed in that industry.
· Support to multiple customer channels: The customer channels supported by the CRM Application like Call Center, Web Chat, Email, SMS etc determine the maturity of the CRM Application
· Flexibility, Agility, Scalability: The CRM system should be flexible to cater to multiple product/process combinations, agile to add/modify the business functionalities quickly and cost effectively and scalable to cater to the increased data load.
· Infrastructure: Increased capacity means increased CAPEX and lower capacity means system unavailability. Hence a proper balance of the availability and cost should be maintained while designing the CRM infrastructure.
· Business Continuity: In case of any major event/mishap, it should be possible to start the customer operations immediately without affecting customers.
· Downtime of the application: The CRM System should be robust enough to have minimal downtime. The system should allow the upgrades/maintenance to be done quickly. This allowance for downtime depends upon the type of the industry.
· Number of defects: The CRM system should be configured in such a way that there are minimal defects in the production.
· Key Performance Indicators Met: Sometimes, the CRM Application may support all the business critical functionalities however some of the Key Performance Indicators like cycle time, right first time are not met. In this case, it is necessary to do an in-depth assessment of the CRM application and identify the areas that need to be improved.
· Data driven decision making: The CRM system’s close integration with the customer data warehouse and other systems determines the way decisions will be made during the interactions with the clients. Hence it is very important that the CRM system is capable behaving as per the set business rules and display data in real time for decision making.
· User Help: Online user help should be provided to the customer serving agents / customers to resolve their queries themselves. The help should be simple, accurate and to the point.
Some of the most important factors that need to be considered to make CRM Implementation a success are:
· Functionality Supported: The maturity of the CRM Application is dependent on the functionalities desired by the customer. The CRM Application should cater to all the major functionalities needed by the customer else the customer should evaluate various other CRM options to ensure that business critical requirements are met.
· Business Processes: The CRM Application should follow Industry wide accepted business processes tailored to its business requirements with minimal bottlenecks. In-built alternate workflows should be provided in the application to cater to bottleneck situations, rejections and manual fall outs.
· Best Practices Implemented: The CRM application should be designed/configured in such a way that it implements some of the best practices followed in that industry.
· Support to multiple customer channels: The customer channels supported by the CRM Application like Call Center, Web Chat, Email, SMS etc determine the maturity of the CRM Application
· Flexibility, Agility, Scalability: The CRM system should be flexible to cater to multiple product/process combinations, agile to add/modify the business functionalities quickly and cost effectively and scalable to cater to the increased data load.
· Infrastructure: Increased capacity means increased CAPEX and lower capacity means system unavailability. Hence a proper balance of the availability and cost should be maintained while designing the CRM infrastructure.
· Business Continuity: In case of any major event/mishap, it should be possible to start the customer operations immediately without affecting customers.
· Downtime of the application: The CRM System should be robust enough to have minimal downtime. The system should allow the upgrades/maintenance to be done quickly. This allowance for downtime depends upon the type of the industry.
· Number of defects: The CRM system should be configured in such a way that there are minimal defects in the production.
· Key Performance Indicators Met: Sometimes, the CRM Application may support all the business critical functionalities however some of the Key Performance Indicators like cycle time, right first time are not met. In this case, it is necessary to do an in-depth assessment of the CRM application and identify the areas that need to be improved.
· Data driven decision making: The CRM system’s close integration with the customer data warehouse and other systems determines the way decisions will be made during the interactions with the clients. Hence it is very important that the CRM system is capable behaving as per the set business rules and display data in real time for decision making.
· User Help: Online user help should be provided to the customer serving agents / customers to resolve their queries themselves. The help should be simple, accurate and to the point.
In short, determining the maturity of the CRM Application in your own business parlance is very important before making any CRM investment decision. In case it is not done, the investment in the CRM Applications might go waste.
Comments
Few more, which comes to my mind are:
- Stability of CRM vendor itself. When you are making multi-million dollar investment in CRM application, please ensure that the vendor's company is stable too, to support the product till its planned lifetime
- Extensibiity: None of the CRM application can stand on its own and it needs to communicate it with 3rd party apps. Check how easy it is to integrate with other apps (like compliance with SOA architecture, etc.)
- User Adoption of its UI and processes
Posted by: Vishal Mani | August 19, 2009 01:00 AM
Vishal, all of your points are very valid. Vendor Stability is the most important factor that needs to be considered before selecting the application.
Posted by: Suhas Kanade | August 19, 2009 06:18 AM
Would like to share few points
1. As much as possible, CRM system should be designed in a simple & user friendly way (avoiding complexities, so that less cost is required in training front end agents. Also less time is utilized while actually using them)
2. Secondly, it should be stand-alone & automated as far as possible, in the sense, it should not be much dependent on other systems to fetch data while order/fault entry. This will reduce processing time at the CRM stage. Also the interfaces of CRM system with other systems should involve less system complexities.
Posted by: Kirti | August 20, 2009 04:15 AM
Kirti, I agree with your first point. Regarding your second point the current trend is to have applications integrated in a loosely coupled fashion using service oriented architecture. But definitely the integration should be robust enough to have almost real time data.
Posted by: Suhas | August 25, 2009 09:15 AM
In this era of collaboration, one very important aspect from a CRM implementation perspective is the aspect of Integration. Without Integration it will be very difficult to take full credit of the CRM implementation, with data dispersed in a variety of "source of truths" as they are called. Technology to support this Integration and the ability and the commitment from the top management to make this happen is very important.
This brings me to the next important factor of stakeholder commitment. This might be a slight digression from this post which is purely on the implementation plane. But, nevertheless without the commitment from every stakeholder involved no matter how efficient, flexible, technically forward looking, latest technology/architecture and scalable a CRM tool and/or implementation is; success will depend on this very important factor of commitment.
Posted by: Venkataraman.R | August 25, 2009 01:44 PM
Venkat, I fully agree with you that top management / stakeholder commitment is a must to the success of any CRM Implementation.
Posted by: Suhas | September 4, 2009 10:42 AM