Change Management Two Years After Implementation

Peter Avery
Member

Posted 08-Sep-2003 06:27 AM
Hi

It is almost two years since we implemented a CRM program and went live with our Onyx v2.5 CRM system at our B2B member services organisation. I was brought into the organisation to be the business owner of the system to make it work about 9 months after go live as they were not receiving the expected benefits, the system was unstable, difficult to use, everyone hated it, people were not using it, no one was extracting any value from it, etc. The organisation was in a typical post go live CRM state with no business ownership of CRM, no on going programme of CRM initiatives, no customer insights, traditional approach to DM e.g fax all customers, no data maintenance program, limited segmentation, limited analysis and an absence of CRM skills (I know..what were they thinking...but my role was to make it work).

After a fairly lengthy program of enhancements, data maintenance, insights, targeted direct marketing and education many perceptions have turned around. We have substantially improved the quality, completeness and accuracy of our db by growing the breadth and depth of customer information, purging old outdated records, updating records and significantly enriching the data.

We have now moved into the phase of the development of the CRM Vision, CRM strategy, definition of ideal customers. We are part way through communicating this Vision along with an understanding of who our customers are from our insights so we can target the right customers with the right offer at the right time. We have just developed a job title codeframe so we can now target the right contact at an organisation rather than just the primary contact. We also successfully upgraded to Onyx v4.5 yesterday so there are now a lot more runs on the board and the organisation has a significantly greater understanding of what CRM really means but it definately is far from customer centric. (It still dumbfounds me that they spent several million dollars on a CRM program with out a CRM Vision or CRM strategy, but honestly I hadn't earned the right to go down that path until we fixed a lot of it up- now we have earned the right to do so).

With the above long-winded history in mind, I'd like some advice on how to approach the change management challenge particularly in relation to the following; developing customer centric behaviours, creating a performance driven customer centric culture, aligning various disparate business units around customers, improving salesforce effectiveness through applying CRM principles, taking our Direct marketing to the next level and most importantly, what is in it for the users to change the way they behave (WIFM). I have to apply the theory and make it deliver bottom line results in the shortest possible time.

Any thoughts based on solid change management and educational theories that have proven successful in CRM transformational change would be greatly appreciated. Bear in mind, I have no resources and virtually no team.

Best Regards

Peter Avery
Project Manager CRM
peteavery247@yahoo.com.au

Fred Hess
Member

Posted 11-Sep-2003 11:16 AM
Hi Peter. The CRM journey has several phases. The first is effectivenes, getting the system, processes and data under control. It sounds like you have done that. The second phase is effectiveness—determining the customer preferences. The idea is to use the information to understand what the customers value to improve the way you service them. You might be doing some of that now. The third phase I call Personalization. You must understand the key loyalty drivers for the market and segment and analyze what capabilities you need to change or add. The final stage I call Optimization. Because you know the customer's buying patterns, you will be able to predict their probable next purchase.
The most difficult part of implementing these later CRM phases is getting the desired behavoirs from the customer facing people. The most effective way I have found to do this is the following:
- Describe what you mean by Customer-centric or customer-focused—identify in detail what objectives you are trying to achieve from the customers perspective. Eg. customer satis of 90%, resolve 80% of customer issues in one call, etc.
- From those determine what people behavoirs are required to achieve those objectives and determine how to measure those.
- Finally brainstorm the incentives that could be implemented that will encourage the desired behavoirs.

What I have found is that there are usually conflicting metrics that cause people to work at cross purposes or do undesired actions that benefit the company not the customer. Hopefully this approach will highlight and realign them.
Good luck

Raffy
Member

Posted 11-Sep-2003 11:38 AM
Hi Peter.

I can only suggest this: let them know what "change" exactly is on the corporate scene as well as their personal lives. In a previous company, long before we implemented pre-CRM automation, the entire organization went through "Change Management" seminars & focus groups. We repeated a lot of sessions (we called them re-audit) so that communication isn't landing on some deaf ears. When everyone was keyed into "change," implementing automation such as a CRM system will be more convenient to you and your team and, most importantly, easier to comprehend on the people.

RAFFY

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 16-Sep-2003 10:35 AM
Peter

I think you have hit the proverbial nail on the head. It is relatively easy to implement a CRM system, but changing the larger organisation to match the system's potential, and maintaining it over time, is several orders of magnitude harder.

Unfortunately for you, you inherited someone else's CRM project, one that seems not to have tackled the organisational and change management issues as an integral part of the project. As the two largest studies of CRM projects to-date (one the CRMGuru Blueprint and the other by George Day at Wharton) identified, this integration is essential if CRM is to be successful.

What seems to have been happening is that those involved in the CRM project have been going through an unplanned change process. This has largely been based upon them adapting the system to their existing behaviours, rather than the other way round. So not only do they have to learn and adopt new behaviours required to get the most out of the system's potential, but they also have to unlearn inappropriate behaviours that they have learned by themselves to survive. A change management "double whammy" if ever there was one.

Although there isn't really space to do justice to your complex request here, there are some things you should think about while you work out what will work best for your own organisation.

The target behaviours you described are part of what are known in OD circles as a 'high-performance work system'. There is plenty of stuff out there that will help you to identify what HPWS behaviours your organisation currently has and where the biggest gaps are. This will provide you with a starting point to think about what OD interventions you need to put in place to start the difficult change journey you have in front of you. Use a robust change model like John Kotter's 8 step model plus Peter Senge's change blockers model to devise an effective change programme that handles not only planned change, but also the blockers of change.

Individual change is basically an emotional process (in that it involves changing largely sub-conscious beliefs, attitudes and therefore expressed behaviours), rather than a conscious logical process. But achieving organisational change requires that individual change cascades into group-level change and ultimately, when about 40-50% of the target organisation has adopted the new behaviours, proper organisation-wide change.

Achieving this change will probably require a combination of experiential training and work-place support, line-management led communications, performance-based incentives, plus long-term support from a customer-focussed management. Just putting in an incentive system to reward the right behaviours won't get you where you want to get to. The same applies to communications broadcast AT staff. and the sort of 'chalk and talk' training that normally goes with systems implementation.

There is a lot of stuff out there to help you decide what to do. Look for stuff by Hanna on high-performance work systems, Kotter and Senge on the change process, Larkin & Larkin on communications and Repenning on maintaining change over a longer duration. Unfortunately I haven't seen anything good about training out there, although there are some new ideas from Educational Kinesiology that may be very useful, particularly in helping staff unlearn the wrong behaviours.

Contact me off-forum if you want further information about the change process.

Graham Hill
Independent Management Consultant