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It’s just over a year since we set up our
search and selection business specialising in
CRM, direct marketing, customer analysis and
insight, market research and e-business. We
have met many of the best people in the industry
– including client-side directors of direct
marketing, CRM and customer insight and specialists
from marketing communications agencies and from
many systems and information services suppliers.
Often, we find that it is direct marketing people
running or supporting CRM programmes.
Our candidate management process
involves in-depth interviews. We also ask candidates
to develop clear statements of their positioning
and expected career, based on their experience,
skills and requirements. Reviewing this material
is fascinating. It makes us wonder whether candidates’
attempts to implement CRM strategies and solutions
tend to succeed or fail. There is no simple
answer here. Few give us evidence of great success
in implementing CRM. Most described their companies’
caution and uncertainty about CRM. This often
hampers progress, creating a vicious circle
of lack of commitment and resource and weak
implementation. If there were any successes,
it seems that companies do not shout about it
from the roof tops. We understand their caution
in promoting their achievements, especially
considering that many of them experienced big
failures in the early years of CRM. However,
many cited examples of individual bits of progress,
creating the hope that when fully and properly
implemented, CRM delivers the promised success.
As an aside, in companies where success is being
achieved, a lot more internal and external PR
would do wonders, preventing frequent sliding
backwards. It’s amazing how many managers
of CRM programmes which, on the evidence we
receive from our many sources of information
are very successful, bewail to us the lack of
support and tell us that a senior management
change is putting their programme and jobs at
risk.
The people we meet at NowellStone
are bright, focused and desperate for change.
However, most are unclear of their real role
and influence. Whether it’s because of
a lack of commitment from the board or a poorly
informed marketing director, attempts to roll
out strategic CRM programmes often do not even
get off the ground and either end up in failure
or are seen as a disjointed solution. We are
still uncertain as to whether this is because
simplistic approaches are taken to CRM programme
management or whether the opposite is true –
that the process of implementing CRM is being
approached in too complicated a way. After all,
the recent IBM global CRM study shows clearly
that CRM success is closely correlated with
adoption of classic approaches to managing programmes
and people and with ensuring that CRM is properly
embedded in business and marketing strategy.
We wonder whether this has been forgotten in
the rush to produce complicated multichannel
dialogue programmes rather than making steady
improvements to how an organisation understands
and then manages its customers.
One thing is sure - to work
in and make it in CRM, you need to be strong,
determined and persistent, with a belief that
you can really change your organisation’s
culture from a focus just on products and sales
to a focus which balances these with customer
management. Once, when organisations threw everything
at implementing CRM, this demanded total commitment
from the board down. This proved hard to achieve.
Many boards were not 100% behind the change,
and the CRM initiatives failed. So, many companies
take the “baby steps” approach to
implantation. While this conforms better to
best practice in programme management, it has
the disadvantage of reducing the credibility
of CRM. It’s almost like saying –
we’re not sure if this stuff works so we
need to suck it and see. This allows senior
opponents of CRM to argue that resources and
managerial bandwidth are very limited, and should
not be allocated to CRM.
Where CRM seems to have made
a real difference, why has it? In some cases,
a strong consensus has been created concerning
what CRM should be, reducing previous uncertainties
generated by different views as to what CRM
solutions, processes and strategies were. However,
in many cases different and often conflicting
assumptions and interpretations exist, creating
confusion and frustration. This has not been
helped by the speed at which information technology
is moving, allowing companies to gain much deeper
and broader insight into their customers’
behaviour and to manage customers more consistently
across different channels. All this has put
the marketing fraternity in a state of flux,
often trying to second-guess the next big thing
in CRM (e.g. customer journey management), rather
than to implement well the last big thing (e.g.
delivery of segmented propositions to individual
customers based on their profile, or real time
responsive to customer needs). Meanwhile, they
are watching out for fresh developments. In
this respect, CRM has been a bit like the Internet
revolution, which led to so much improvement
in marketing and selling, while leaving a fair
amount of havoc in its wake, in the form of
failed, over-optimistic initiatives.
We meet candidates at a period
in their life when they want to take stock of
what they have achieved and to consider their
options for the future. Many are unclear as
to where they can go or what they can do. When
we get them talking about their experience in
trying to implement CRM, their usual initial
statement is “It’s a slow process”,
followed by “We need to educate the board
and other departments about the benefits of
CRM.” They find it hard to do when proof
of such achievements are (as they see it) few
and far between. What keeps them focused and
working hard is a strong belief in what CRM
can do for their organisation. So they are not
likely to quit. There seems among our candidates
and clients to be renewed vigour about how to
approach implementing CRM. However, there are
a few things that still need to be ironed out
before we can start to really achieve what we
set out to do in the first place.
One of the things that concern
CRM specialists when they want to move jobs
is their next employer’s commitment to
CRM principles and strategy. This is understandable,
perhaps obvious. Yet some companies, in trying
to attract such candidates, can and will say
anything to get them on board, and sometimes
candidates believe them! Of course, this is
not deliberate deception - the hirer really
does want a credible CRM programme. Yet by the
time the recruit joins, the person they thought
was their ally, their prospective line manager,
has often either been promoted internally or
left to join another company. This is where
problems start. What the candidate perceived
as a company vision was actually one person’s
attempt to manage change. Perhaps his replacement’s
view about CRM isn’t as supportive.
We advise candidates to look
for professionally implemented change management
programmes, focusing on solving, for example,
problems of customer attrition and customer
profitability. CRM is not a support function,
nor a quick solution. Such programmes should
be based on assessment of readiness to change,
and on a realistic appraisal of the company’s
success in managing change. We suggest they
seek evidence that the programme has “crossed
organisational silos”, involving not just
the information management function but also
all functions interfacing with customers, from
sales and service, to marketing, billing, credit
control and customer service. We suggest they
examine the company’s business and marketing
strategies, to identify the impact of customer-focused
thinking, and that they look for consensus about
“who owns the customer”, with the
best outcome being agreement that customer ownership
is shared between the different functions, channels
and product lines, with rules and rights about
what to do in cases of conflict, and a governance
process to manage implementation of the rules
and rights. Sweet declarations of “customer
focus” or “customer centricity”
mean nothing. We also suggest they look for
long lasting training, education and motivation
programmes – CRM is after all mostly about
how supplier and customer staff interact with
each other. Finally, we suggest that they look
hard for signs of top management involvement
and commitment.
Professor Merlin Stone and
Matt Nowell are Directors of NowellStone Search
and Selection.
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