CRM Know How In Practice Transition and change management Best Practice Guide 01
02 Best Practice Guide
CRM Know How In Practice Transition and change management In This Guide 02 Introduction: Why CRM? It s simply good business sense 02 CRM best practice based on our hands-on experience. A CRM model refined and developed through years of varied engagements 03 Transition means change on a massive scale. Anticipate and prepare for the challenge 04 Identifying critical success factors. Strategy, people and process must underpin technology 04 Proactive change management. A robust approach is key for a successful people transition 05 Managing change with ADKAR. Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement 06 Piloting and phasing. Take a modulated approach to roll-out 07 Staying agile. How to keep up with organisational evolution 08 Conclusion Best Practice Guide 01
Introduction: Why CRM? Understanding your customers - and their needs and expectations - is the key to creating delivering great service, attracting and creating loyal, repeat customers, and being able to grow your business with them. If you agree with that statement, you ve grasped the essence of CRM. It s not rocket science, it s just common sense. Your organisation possesses plenty of information about customers and prospects. Your financial and order systems hold data about what they buy and how much they spend. Your employees know how the customers they come into contact with like to engage and do business. Through market research and industry intelligence, you keep up with trends and developments in your marketplace. But how do you bring all of that together, continuously adding to it, and making it available to everyone who engages with that customer? How do you derive competitive edge from rich insights, using them to identify opportunities and risks and to anticipate what your customers will need next? As businesses and individuals, customers choose to engage, communicate and inform themselves through many different media. With the continuing rise of Web 2.0 channels, you need to capture customer insight and offer your customers convenient and user-friendly ways to engage with your organisation. CRM technology and processes allow you to incorporate new media and dynamic communication into your everyday business activities and develop correspondingly deeper, multi-dimensional relationships with your customers, prospects and stakeholders. A CRM programme puts in place common methods of doing business and instils a culture of sharing information and collaborating across departments, functions, staff and managers. You ll capture and share information reliably and comprehensively. You ll be able to work with that information easily to support decision-making and to prioritise investment of time and resources. You ll be able to identify new business opportunities and act on them quickly and efficiently, bringing goods and services to your customers at the moment they need them. If your employees have the right information to hand when any interaction with a customer takes place, they can respond appropriately and efficiently to the particular needs of that customer. Customer satisfaction will be high: you ll create a virtuous circle of loyal customers who evangelise on your behalf. Everyone in your organisation can play their part in adding to your collective knowledge and making use of it to deliver outstanding service. That s what CRM can achieve for you. CRM best practice based on our hands-on experience This Best Practice Guide is the fourth in a five-part series. It describes the fourth step of our proven, five-step CRM optimisation model The TouchstoneCRM Success Cycle. We ve developed and refined this over hundreds of engagements where we ve introduced CRM from scratch or stepped in to recover or improve existing and unsatisfactory CRM programmes. We ve observed the characteristics of projects that achieved their full potential, fell some way short or failed outright. The TouchstoneCRM Success Cycle is technology agnostic. It works whether you prefer cloud-based or on-premises CRM. It applies equally well to projects supporting B2B or B2C organisations, to commercial organisations and not-for-profits. It s a best practice approach that supports engagements driven by a range of business objectives, including: increasing sales increasing customer loyalty and stakeholder engagement introducing a social media engagement model supporting 1-2-1 marketing decreasing the cost to serve or a combination of these and other business-specific outcomes. 02 Best Practice Guide
TouchstoneCRM Success Cycle Transition means change on a massive scale The transition stage of a CRM project is the point where your organisation s investment in planning, analysis, process design and solution development begins to be translated into the economic benefits set out in your business case. At this time, the rubber really hits the road: you ask teams to move over to new systems and new ways of working. Theoretical plans are converted into practical actions and all the people, process, data, business strategy and technology elements come together. We have seen many well-conceived and well-intentioned CRM projects falter at this point. Managing change on this scale across your entire organisation is always challenging. You need disciplines in place to control and monitor what s happening and to respond to unexpected events and situations. Our TouchstoneCRM Success Cycle identifies four considerations that you must plan for before rollout. They need to form part of your planning in the early stages of the project, if you are to achieve a smooth transition to live running. Critical Success Factors Piloting & Phasing Change Management Retaining Agility Best Practice Guide 03
Identifying critical success factors Industry studies* conclude that the critical success factors that you identify must embrace the people, process, strategy elements of your CRM project, as well as technology. This supports our view that although CRM software is sophisticated and powerful, it delivers no value by itself. Only when deployed correctly in the context of a defined business strategy and supported by people and processes can it empower your organisation and deliver the outcomes you want. Transitioning people in your CRM roll-out is addressed by effective change management practices, dealt with in the next section. We make the following recommendations for your process, strategy and technology critical success factors. Proactive change management Success Factors Process Putting it into practice You must design customer-centric business processes that support stated business outcomes. These might include reducing customer churn rate, reducing the cost of sale, increasing order value or conversion rates. Avoid allowing your organisation s internal needs to overshadow those of the customer in your process design. This is a common mistake that derails otherwise well-planned CRM projects. At the point of implementation, the effectiveness of your new systems will be compromised if you have not applied this critical success factor Strategy The point of CRM is to improve your customer-facing business processes. Technology is only a means to achieving that end. Every successful implementation begins by creating project structures that are customer-centric and business-led. Critical project structures: a cross-functional team the support of an influential executive sponsor a clear definition of the problem you are trying to solve and how you will measure success It is critically important to define the specific business benefits that you expect your CRM project to deliver. This might sound obvious, but many projects fail because the benefits are poorly defined or relate to secondary agendas. Clarify precisely what you want your CRM solution to achieve. The benefits need to be specific and tangible: increasing average order value, improving forecast accuracy or improving customer response times. Technology As your project transitions into live running and beyond, your organisation s business imperatives may have evolved to reflect market conditions, innovation and competitive factors. This puts pressure on the project team who have worked on solution design based on objectives and environmental factors determined at an earlier point in time. That s why agile businesses design flexibility into their solution from the outset. Adaptability is therefore a critical success factor. You can plan for this by selecting CRM technology that allows affordable configuration, by using out-of-the-box functionality as opposed to custom development and by keeping design as simple as possible.. *including Investigating Critical Success Factors of Customer Relationship Management Implementation: World Applied Sciences Journal 18 (8): 1052-1064, 2012 ISSN 1818-4952, IDOSI Publications, 2012 04 Best Practice Guide
In most cases, a well-conceived CRM project forms part of a wider business transformation programme. Your organisation seeks to create an environment that fosters collaboration, information sharing and customer-centricity and strives for a more efficient operational model. This imposes new ways of working upon your customer facing staff and those in operational roles. That s why a multi-stream change management programme is a vital element of your planning. Along with process and technology, managing the human element of your transition is a critical success factor: effective change management will allow you to control and support it. Managing change with ADKAR We manage change using the established ADKAR model, which can be scaled to reflect the level of change your organisation or team is facing. Awareness Desire Knowledge Ability Reinforcement Awareness Change management starts with awareness: early and frequent communication to your teams about the rationale for the business change. People s natural reaction to change, even in the best circumstances, is to resist. You need to make sure your employees and partners understand and accept why the business needs to change before you can ask them to adopt new ways of working. Desire The next building block is desire - an individual s willingness to engage and participate. Personal motivation to accept the change is key. Focus your communication on the benefits and improvements that will affect each role and function. Our experience has brought us to a deep understanding of a variety of user adoption drivers. Employees may be motivated by realising that they will have access to previously unavailable insight, or will be cutting out time-consuming administration or repetition through streamlined processes. Best Practice Guide 05
Their working life might be enhanced by accessibility from mobile devices and remote locations. It s also helpful to stimulate evangelism for the new solution within each team. A good approach is to appoint a user champion and second them to the project team. Knowledge At this stage it is all about education and training for the skills and behaviours that are needed for change. We recommend training early and often, in role- and process-based groups. Ability Each individual needs skills to perform and act on their new knowledge. This ability may only be developed in time, with practice. On-going coaching, mentoring and support from line managers and the project team is vital to support development and build confidence. Reinforcement Retaining the change once it has been made also needs focus. It s all too easy for employees to slip back to old and less efficient ways of working if they re not reminded and supported. We have established a range of approaches that you can apply to different situations, with using the carrot and the stick principle. If your project team has got the design right to meet the needs of both customers and users, the most effective reinforcement approach is for team managers and senior leaders themselves to use the CRM system actively and consistently to manage your business. For example, they should use its dashboards in operational meetings to monitor and act upon activity and trends identified in data. Sales managers would run sales review meetings using sales opportunity, pipeline and forecast data from CRM and coach their teams in the context of the sales process structure. You can further reinforce acceptance with good communication of wins and benefits realised as a result of the CRM deployment. This can be top-down and formal, or via informal communication within a team or as a result of evangelism by nominated champions or influencers. Piloting and phasing Your CRM programme is cross-functional, transformational and has dependencies on people, process, strategy and technology. It s a complex environment where you must anticipate and build in time to address issues. There are also inter-dependencies between functions and processes, which will only be fully exercised at the point of transition. A live launch of the entire CRM programme across your whole organisation could bring unmanageable levels of risk. Instead, you can break the project down into a set of manageable phases that form part of your overall CRM roadmap. Not surprisingly, once your business case has been approved by the board, the pressure is on to deliver the anticipated returns at pace. To demonstrate substantial progress in good time, we recommend identifying one department or function there s the opportunity for a quick win. Its associated proof points can be used to sustain the CRM journey. In our experience, the early stages must deliver a compelling operational impact. Senior management can quickly lose faith if you cannot show a good result quickly. In the face of constant and strong competition from other internal projects for resources and investment, this puts your programme at risk of curtailment. 06 Best Practice Guide
Staying agile One of the most significant risks associated with a large-scale CRM programme is the planning, design, build and deployment may take many months after the start of requirements gathering. If the needs of your business have evolved in the meantime, your solution when delivered may lack relevance and fail to support current business imperatives. Traditional CRM projects typically follow a waterfall design methodology where the Analysis->Design->Build-> Test->Train->Go-Live project stages follow each other in a linear fashion, supported by high levels of documentation and formal sign-off gates. Increasingly we are deploying more agile rapid project methodologies, where individual project phases (iterations) are delivered faster. We work collaboratively with our customers using prototypes and frequent reviews instead of high levels of static documentation to guide the development. This means you can anticipate and react to the changing business environment in a controlled manner. This more responsive method means that the time it takes to deliver value is reduced. But more importantly, the solution delivered to users matches the current needs of your business far more closely, which makes transition easier. Client CRM Vision & Business Case Detailed Design Build & System Test User Acceptance Testing Deployment Traditional High-Level Design Updated Business Case Project Initiation Document Live Running & Benefits Realisation Iterations User Acceptance Testing Deployment Rapid Touchstone s Navigate Project Methodology supports both Traditional and Rapid deployment models Best Practice Guide 07
Conclusion There are a number of crucial factors that you need to consider and plan for at the beginning and throughout the project if you are to achieve a smooth transition and realise the desired benefits fully. Every project is different and the critical success factors and user adoption drivers will be unique for your organisation. That s why it s so important to engage all your stakeholders effectively and put in place strong project governance. The success of your transition phase depends on making good decisions during the design and build phase. You need to choose the right design approach (waterfall or rapid) and maintain focus on customer needs and business outcomes. We discuss these issues in more detail in the design and build best practice guide which forms part of this series. Working with a trusted CRM consultant means you can be confident that you are well prepared for transition. At Touchstone we have the experience and expertise to help you make an effective transition to full CRM deployment that will enable you to realise in full the valuable benefits that justify your investment and fuel business growth. 08 Best Practice Guide
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The Touchstone Approach People, Partnership and Solutions are the building blocks of successful TouchstoneCRM programmes. People Every CRM journey begins with people yours and ours coming together to agree objectives, standards and methodologies. We ll develop a partnership and work together to deliver the successful outcomes you seek. Our consultants bring a transformative combination of innovation, skills and enthusiasm to every project. They are all seasoned CRM specialists with deep sector knowledge and a firm grasp of business objectives and priorities. They take personal responsibility for exceeding your expectations. We don t just put our customers first we put you way ahead. Partnership We don t just work with you: we truly work together. You can treat us as an extension of your team. We re always on hand and deeply engaged with your CRM vision. We also partner with our IT suppliers so we always have the latest knowledge about the platforms we recommend. We keep things simple and effective by using best-in-class platforms that we ve chosen because we know they support business growth effectively. With our unrivalled expertise in these platforms, we can identify the best application for your business. Collaborative, supportive and consultative, we are success-led, not sales-led. That s why we enjoy so many long-lasting, mutually rewarding client relationships. Solutions Our core strength is in the way we use our experience to understand your business and your objectives. Software is simply a tool to help you get where you want to be. One size fits all doesn t work for us. We deliver personalised solutions that fit your organisation s specific needs. We understand that your business is constantly evolving and customer requirements are changing, so we equip you with solutions that grow with you. Whether you need support with an initiative you ve started, help to augment or recover an existing project, or a brand new CRM programme, we have the business understanding, energy, ability, resources and enthusiasm to deliver beyond your expectations. www.touchstonecrm.co.uk moreinfocrm@touchstone.co.uk TouchstoneCRM Limited 1Triton Square London NW1 3DX 010 Best Practice Guide Copyright TouchstoneCRM Limited 2013