CRM News Feed

When working with large customers, it’s important
to have an understanding of the account and contact hierarchies. You want to
know who reports to who and whether or not a company is a subsidiary of a
larger entity.

As many of you may well know this is standard
functionality in Salesforce.com, but thanks to a free plug-in from Dream Factory,
updating these hierarchies is easier than ever. 

In a matter of minutes, you can create a custom
link on the account and contact page. All you have to do is cut and paste the
code below. 

Once your org chart links are in place, your reps
will have the ability to launch the org chart and make changes on the fly in a
simple drag and drop interface.

https://www.dreamfactory.com/orgview/orgview.html?
sessionid={!API_Session_ID}&
serverurl={!API_Partner_Server_URL_60}&
username={!User_Username}&
fullname={!User_FullName}&
linkid={!Account_ID}&
userid={!User_ID}

While the ultimate measure of online performance is whether or not your Web site helps your company to achieve its business goals, such as customer acquisition, conversion or brand-building, there are many other variables impacting this performance. A Web site has to perform well on many levels and in many areas before it can achieve business success. Companies need to recognize these areas and how they can understand and ensure that they are performing well on each of them.

It’s time to start thinking about what comes after CRM. I am not trying to be alarmist or to set a dire tone, I just think there’s a good amount of evidence that CRM has taken us as far as it’s going to and we need to think about something beyond it. That’s not to say that CRM is dead — far from it. There’s too much sunk cost in CRM systems to think that anyone would seriously contemplate a wholesale abandonment, and CRM has certainly done some very positive things for most companies. What comes next has to be evolutionary and based on the revolution that CRM brought.

Many of you have asked when detailed release notes for our upcoming Winter ’06 release will be available. In case you missed it on our successforce.com home page, all the details are now posted. Visit Winter ‘06 Release for our Winter ’06 Admin preview, new feature detail pages, detailed release notes, and more.

Have a question? AskWendy@CRMsuccess.com.

Today the
Personalized Account Review was sent out to all Salesforce.com Administrators
and those opted in to the Admin Newsletter. If you didn’t receive
the Personalized Account Review and want more information on opting in, click here.

Bangalore is the city of dreams. It is the city where failure is a stranger, and expectations climb as high as the booming Indian stock market. Bangalore today accounts for a large slice of India’s revenues in outsourced services and offers a model that cities around the world are emulating. Many American companies view it as a place to pursue innovation, while American knowledge workers see it as a threat to jobs. It’s also a city where the clock is ticking.

In a rapidly changing world bound to the Internet, understanding customers is vital to success, writes David Jackson, who predicts that listening will become more crucial in the marketing mix.

What should CEM mean to you? Ginger Cooper, founder of the Customer Relationship Management Association, conducts an email round table with six CRM thought leaders

The customer team is a powerful and fundamental CRM concept that can solve a variety of problems, especially for small to medium-size enterprises, writes Jay Curry.

Once you’ve migrated your data, implemented programming interfaces and consolidated the IT architecture, all CRM IT implementation projects have a common objective when coming closer to the end of implementation, writes Silvana Buljan: assuring that users really use the new CRM system.

It is not uncommon to find organizations in which a small number of customers represent significant sales or profits. It is known as the 80/20 rule, meaning 80 percent of revenues are coming from 20 percent of customers. For example, one enterprise we know of has 600 customers with the top 100 representing 97.5 percent of the revenue contribution. In another case, a client’s CRM efforts are focused on its top 5,000 clients (about 5 percent of its total customer base) that as a group represent 90 percent of total revenue. Recently such a customer contacted us for advice on successful CRM strategies for when a small number of customers represent a significant percentage of sales or profits. Their thinking was, “We don’t generate new leads as we already know who are customers are so how can CRM help us?”  To learn CRM best practices for managing strategic customers, read on.

Here are five key CRM best practices for when a few customers represent significant sales:

1. Create strategic account teams with sales and support responsibilities for your largest customers, most profitable customers, those with the greatest lifetime value or some other meaningful customer segmentation criteria. These account teams serve as the preferred point of contact for strategic customers. These teams enable the organization to present a single face to the strategic customer treating it is a single entity. Organize around the customer versus products, geographies, internal departments or processes.
2. Select and adopt a strategic account management process. Strategic account managers require a selling process that centers-around a deep understanding of customers’ financial goals, strategies, tactics, business processes, service levels, risk profiles, and marketplace and competitive conditions. They need account plans that show the linkages against the customer organization, and identify the activities, strategies, tactics and time frames to execute the plan. A strategic account management process can be internally developed or adopted from a sales methodology vendor. There are many sales methodologies available for strategic account management. Salesforce.com has partnered with the leading methodology authors to integrate sales methodologies into Salesforce. Current partners include Miller Heiman, SPI (Solution Selling), The Complex Sale, ValueVision, and others.
3. Use an on-demand account management system to: 1) define all the people involved in managing an account, along with their respective roles (executive sponsor, dedicated support rep, and so on), 2) define parent-child relationships between accounts to depict complex organizations with multiple subsidiaries or divisions, 3) provide a 360-degree view of each of strategic customer to manage all customer information and interactions in one place, 4) analyze and use customer information to proactively identify and solve customer problems, and 5) embody your account training and your chosen strategic account management methodology and make it part of the everyday routine of your account teams.
4. Know what your strategic accounts want most. This can be done by instituting frequent measures of customer satisfaction. For surveying strategic accounts, there are two customer satisfaction survey solutions from our partners integrated into Salesforce, available on the AppExchange. Use the tools to survey strategic customers to see which top 3 to 5 processes they care most about (e.g., getting an engineer on-site, invoicing, pricing updates, and self-service web portal) and focus your CRM efforts on improving these processes. Set delivery standards and proper expectations with them regularly and provide consistent interaction to keep strategic customers abreast of internal developments that may affect them. We know of many organizations that have strategic customer advisory boards they meet with quarterly or semi-annually to collect and report on customer feedback. Take it a step further and evaluate the benefits of creating a community for strategic customers, link customer to customer.
5. Consider providing private and personalized customer web sites to strategic accounts as an opportunity to reduce the costs of supporting strategic accounts and improve customer satisfaction. The objective is not to eliminate the valuable face-to-face personal time sales and service people spend with strategic customers, but to increase the communication flow by leveraging 24×7 Internet availability for customer access to a private Web site where it can find historical data, order information (e.g., product quantities ordered, product quantities shipped, orders pending), contact information, billing data, contract information, and more. Ask strategic customers their preferred methods of communications and implement self-service where it will improve sales and service quality for strategic accounts.

Have a CRM question? AskWendy@CRMsuccess.com.

A new survey released last week by Strategy Analytics indicates that the “style” of a mobile phone may be the key feature that users rely on when gauging their satisfaction with mobile phone technology. The study by Boston-based Strategy Analytics analyzes mobile device buyer satisfaction across 20 “critical product attributes” for customers in the U.S. and Western Europe. Owners of phones produced by LG reported the highest satisfaction ratings in 17 out of 19 categories in Western Europe and in 9 out of 19 in the U.S.

At some high-end hotels, new computer systems that connect individual rooms to network servers can now keep track of guests’ preferences and change the room conditions automatically. These “smart” systems can learn whether a frequent guest likes the lights dimmed, the curtains closed or the room toasty. They can also personalize the electronics so that John Coltrane, for instance, greets jazz buffs when they enter their rooms. And sensors in refrigerators alert maids when the minibar is running low on soda.

It’s only a matter of time until Google unleashes a free low-end hosted CRM suite. The heart of the business model for free CRM will be the potential for driving up advertising revenue while at the same time up-selling advanced CRM features. With Google Analytics launched and delivering a depth of features other free analytics packages can’t touch, the progression of Google’s product strategy is starting to take shape.

For some companies, CRM means managing each transaction and checking the customer’s satisfaction at the end. This is exactly why a company’s customer loyalty scores are always lower than the satisfaction score. CRM is a lot more than buying a lot of products and services from a software company. It’s mostly about your attitude toward and approach to customers. The best CRM system in the world will be useless in the face of organizational ambivalence and bottom line mentality.

For your customer service failures

For years enterprises have tried to combat customer service issues with technology. For example, often organizations do not have a central location to keep all of a customer’s data. The customer’s e-mail requests are stored in one location while records of phone conversations are located someplace else. When this happens the call center manager approaches the IT manager and says, "We need a database". The IT manager then researches the latest in knowledge-bases and buys the technology that will best fit the current architecture.

After spending quite a bit of time and money getting this knowledge-base up and running, the system still doesn’t seem to run smoothly. Data is not inputted regularly so the information in the knowledge-base is often stale, incomplete or inaccurate. The Call Center manager then goes back to the IT manager and complains that the customer relationship management (CRM) solution is not working properly. To which the IT manager protests that the technology is working fine, but it is the fault of the agents for not using it properly. The ensuing result of the project is another piece of technology not being used to the best of its ability and the gap between IT and the business user is driven further apart.

You are now probably asking how this problem could be resolved, as it seems like a vicious cycle. The solution is actually quite simple – process planning and automation. Customer service failures are often a process problem rather than a technology one. CRM solutions are meant to carry out simple tasks – automatic responses to e-mails, online searches offerings, the logging and maintenance of client information, and so on. However, behind each of these tasks lies a laundry list of human workflow processes that need to be captured and automated before the CRM technology can work properly.

For years users have been trying to extend the capabilities of the CRM technology to capture the work that really needs to be done by Business Process Management (BPM). In the case above, the IT manager and Call Center manager need to work more closely together to identify the processes that are involved in capturing information. All too often, organizations think there are processes in place, but then later find out that there are deviations from the process, causing hiccups in the overall system.

Additionally, the technology that is implemented needs to adapt to the business’ culture rather than the typical scenario of the business needing to adapt to the technology. This may sound very basic, but people don’t like change and the more an organization tries to force change, the more likely that the project will fail. That is why all too often perfectly capable CRM systems become shelf-ware.

In the example above, once the IT manager and Call Center manager outlined the processes that needed to be addressed they should look to add BPM to their existing CRM systems.

BPM is defined as the automation of processes using a rule-based system that invokes the appropriate tools, and supplies necessary information, checklists, examples and status reports to the user. In basic terms, BPM bridges the gap between technology and the people who need to use the technology.

In our knowledge-base example, the CRM system was purchased to capture customer data from multiple locations. The system the IT manager purchased can do that, but it can’t make the agents input the data they gather throughout the day. Therefore, it is vital to not only have processes in place to ensure that the updated customer information is entered, but automating some of the more basic functions will aid the overall adoption of the new technology.

For example, when an agent receives an incoming call, a trouble ticket should automatically be launched. This could include a standard form that the agent fills out during the phone conversation. Once that call ends, or if the call needs to be escalated, the agent can submit the form to the system so the data is automatically saved, and a notice is sent to the person who is responsible for following up on the initial trouble ticket. Additionally, if further action is not taken reminders are automatically put in place. If those reminders are not met then the trouble ticket is elevated to the next in command to ensure that there is a resolution to the customer’s request.

By automating this process, the system ensures that the initial customer inquiry is seen through to fruition. It also forces those agents involved in the process to fill out the appropriate paperwork in a timely manner. This keeps the knowledge-base up-to-date, and customers happy because they are guaranteed answers to their questions.

CRM is very useful and can have a major impact on bettering the business, when used properly. It is not meant to solve process problems, rather CRM is meant to better the customer service experience. Therefore, businesses need to take a step back and review the entire situation before making a decision to purchase a new technology. More often than not a solution can be found by using better process management practices in conjunction with the technology that is currently available.

by Rashid Khan, Ultimus. Rashid Khan is CEO of Ultimus. Khan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Masters in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley, and a B.S. in Computer Science from M.I.T.

In October 1998, the communications company ONE launched Austria’s only nation-wide GSM-1800 mobile telephony network. As ONE acquired a 3G license in November 2000, pressure was building to implement their 3G strategy. An early commercial launch of GPRS services ahead of their competitors, was considered a key step in achieving this strategy and driving 3G success. ONE selected Geneva from Convergys as the billing platform to address their business requirements.