Ratcheting Up Your CRM Performance
Moving into the upper echelons of CRM performance should rank high among strategic objectives for companies hoping to vie successfully in today’s competitive, increasingly customer-oriented marketplace. Strengthening CRM organization goes hand-in-hand with better performance. Marketers need to articulate a clear strategy for building customer relationships, create a compelling program of customer initiatives to capture value, and invest pragmatically in new technology. However, to fully realize their customer aspirations and ensure payback on key investments, high performers will also systematically strengthen their organization – broadly defined across structure, skills, and processes – to execute and sustain their new customer vision. Effective CRM organization is the key to success for many customer marketers who want to turn aspiration into achievement.
So where does the effort to strengthen organization begin?
Organization improvement is a step-by-step process. As our research indicates, companies migrate to higher levels of performance as they overcome organizational obstacles and demonstrate more of the 10 essential characteristics discussed earlier.
Companies should begin by assessing how existing organization helps or hinders performance. Often, marketers will find that their first steps should involve establishing the right leadership to drive the customer view and building a meaningful set of customer metrics. Others choose to establish an integrated program to drive capabilities, allowing them to skip steps and aggressively target potential organizational bottlenecks.
The following questions provide a good starting point for your self-assessment. If you answer no to three or more of the following questions, you have a significant opportunity to strengthen your CRM organization. The questions should also help you determine what characteristics of high performers you should target first:
1. Does the head of your customer efforts have tangible backing from his/her boss and the broader senior leadership team?
- Have you defined the roles for each channel and product/business in building customer relationships?
- Is resource access (e.g., customer ownership, IT) to support customer initiatives clearly defined?
- Are there guidelines for resolving conflicts?
2. Do you have explicit managers leading day-to-day capture of customer opportunities?
- Is someone responsible for translating your customer insights into pragmatic business action plans?
- Is someone making sure channels are linked to allow seamless delivery of customer initiatives?
- Is someone communicating and making sure your frontline staff understand and support customer initiatives?
3. Do you know who your best “whole house” customers are and how much they’ve grown in the last year?
4. Is someone actively developing your next three ideas to strengthen your relationships with best customers?
5. Do your business unit leaders incorporate changes in customer performance by segment (e.g., sales and profit growth, attrition, migration) into next year’s business plans?
6. Are you getting value from all the data in your database? Have your channels been able to deliver the last five proposed customer initiatives?
7. Do you know your key talent gaps today and going forward? Do you have a clear plan to fill them?
8. Is performance evaluation based at least in part on customer or segment metrics? Does everyone share the same definitions of these metrics?
9. Are results from customer initiatives routinely analyzed? Are underperforming efforts automatically eliminated or replaced with more attractive challengers?
10. Do marketing and related IT support have a shared vision and plan for how to evolve current technology platforms to support ongoing customer-centric efforts? Are current development efforts on schedule?
Your answers have helped you to identify specific gap areas. Now create a roadmap, focusing on the characteristics that can be most useful to you. And above all, remember that this is a journey. Take it one step at a time.
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