CRM Audit

Maarten Vendrik
Member

Posted 13-Sep-2005 03:16 AM
Dear Paul Greenberg

We are two students from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (Netherlands). The next ten weeks we have to make a CRM AUDIT about a Dutch Bank. Can you give us some advise over where we have to start and which part of the bank is the best to audit?

We hope you can give us some information

Kind regards,

Maarten Vendrik, Nienke Kessler

Vladimir Dimitroff
Member

Posted 13-Sep-2005 05:14 PM
Dear Maarten, Nienke—

You have been tasked with a most challenging and interesting assignment (your uni must have a really good understanding of CRM Smile)

I am sure Paul will give you excellent guidance on this, but if there is one CRM guru on this site to know more than others about audits, it is David Rance, author of auditing methodologies and an excellent tool for the task.

While that tool (CC Director) may be somewhat less than affordable for student use, the good news is that it has a free little brother called CC indicator.

Where to start? I suggest that you take this simple online test yourselves to learn about capability measurement and cross-functional customer centricity. On the same site you will also find about the framework and how it is used for assessments (audits).

Which part of the Bank to audit? The entire Bank, nothing less! Remember, CRM does not belong to any particular function, it is everyone's job, across the organisation. The Round framework will show you why this is so; if you like that approach, you may invite a few reprsentatives from all key functions at the Bank (Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, IT, HR, Finance etc.) to take the same test. The results (I am sure Round will help with a collated report to see an aggregate of all responses) can form the 'quantitative' basis of your Audit, leaving you the intellectual challenge to interpret those results in your final coursework/thesis.

Best of luck,

V. Dimitroff, Director
PRISM Consulting—an accredited Round partner
'We're in the business of audits!' Smile

Vladimir Dimitroff
PRISM Consulting (UK)
vdimitroff@prism-gb.com

Jay Curry
Guru
Member

Posted 15-Sep-2005 08:53 AM
You may want to check the (online-based) CRM Readiness Assessment on http://www.jaycurry.com. This may give you a starting position. I am in Amsterdam so call me if you need more info.

Jay Curry
+31-653-793-950

Posted 15-Sep-2005 04:04 PM
My suggestion would to approach this from your experiences and your expectations as a "bank customer".

• What would your ideal experience as a customer be?
• What would you want the bank to know about you?
• How would you want the bank to interact with you—based on their business and your requests?
• What channels would you potentially use to interact with the bank?
• How would your relationship with the bank start and grow over the years?
• What would make you loyal and what would cause you to leave the bank?

After you have an idea of what your "customer experience" should be I would suggest you follow up in all those areas (business and functional) and see how the bank "audits" against your expectations of CRM.

I think that as an assignment keeping it real and relevant to your experiences will keep you the most excited and interested.

Please email me gavinw@onyx.com if you would like some Banking case study information to add to your final project.

Posted 16-Sep-2005 02:37 AM
Very nice project,
my advice is to start where the Customer Relationship is, i.e. at the Branch and then get on with the rest of the "journey" with the different point of contacts and the IT and process infrastructure

Ciao
Italo Cattaneo

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 16-Sep-2005 05:10 AM
Maarten, Nienke

I would like to build on the responses to your question and the same question to David Rance.

I agree with David that the question of scope and sponsorship are critical to carrying out a CRM Audit. Without understanding the breadth and depth of your project's scope, it is hard to know what the CRM Audit should audit. And without an understanding of your sponsor's responsibilities and power (to get things done), it is hard to know how the Audit should be carried out.

Practically every CRM Consultancy has a CRM Audit. I have seen a number of different ones (and was involved in building several of them for PricewaterhouseCoopers CRM practice more than seven years ago). All the CRM Audits are similar and are carried out in similar ways. The trick is in picking the right one, or in developing one that exactly suits your needs.

There are three key problems with CRM Audits that you need to be aware of. You should steer clear of any CRM Audit that cannot show how it overcomes each of the problems.

The first problem with CRM Audits is that they are often based upon wishful thinking by consultants, rather than robust thinking about how to break CRM into meaningful business capabilities. A capability is a unique combination of processes, technologies, information, work practices and other resources, that creates value for the business. Each capability must either deliver value during touchpoints with customers, e.g. a marketing campaign making a relevant offer to a customer, or must support the delivery of value to customers, e.g. through customer analytics identifying the right offer for the marketing campaign. Everything else is just costly waste. The capabilities that underlie most CRM Audits are identified out of a combination of experience, project expediency and plain wishful thinking, rather than through a robust capability analysis process. The result is often not as useful as made out.

The second problem with CRM Audits is that most are not based upon a robust analysis of the impact each capability has on business profitability. If each capability is to either create value or to support the creation of value, it is important to know approximately how much additional value would be created by improving each capability to a higher-level. Would it be better to invest in better marketing creation or in better customer analytics for targeting? Or should I invest in something else entirely? As most organisations only have a limited budget for their CRM projects, it is critical that the CRM Audit can be used to guide where the best returns are to be had from investing in improving particular capabilities. Of the CRM Audit's I have seen, only the Accenture and QCi ones have enough data to link the capabilities to profitability. Without this financial insight, most CRM Audit's are just used to identify CRM capability gaps and then to create business cases for projects to close them. This is the wrong level at which to decide upon where to invest your limited CRM budget. It also plays into the hands of management's prejudices or "pet projects".

The third problem with CRM Audits is that they usually ignore the customer, in particular, they ignore how the customer experiences the company and its products during their lifecycle as customers. If each capability is to either create value during touchpoints with customers or to support the creation of value, as Gavin suggests, it follows that we must understand which capabilities must be used in combination at each touchpoint to deliver value. To do this, the capabilities have to be mapped against each of the touchpoints in the end-to-end customer experience and their inter-dependencies understood. None of the CRM Audits I have seen (including the ones I developed year's ago) do this. Yet this is critical for understanding how the improved CRM capabilities will actually be used to create value for customers and for the organisation during each of the touchpoints.

So there you have it. Having any old CRM Audit is NOT ENOUGH; it must identify the real capabilities that underlie CRM, it must show how each one contributes to profitability and it must show how they are combined together to deliver each touchpoint in the customer experience.

Feel free to contact me through CRMGuru or at graham (dot) hill (at) web (dot) de if you want to discuss this further.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 27-Sep-2005 11:47 AM
[Posted for Michael Starkey]

I think the answer is simple. Use QCi's CMAT—The Customer Management Assessment Tool—This was referred to recently in a conversation on CRMGuru.com between Bob Thompson and Neil Woodcock and Doug Leather (CMAT Can Tell You How Well You Manage Your Customers: An Interview With Neil Woodcock and Doug Leather.

I'd be interested if you can find a CRM auditing tool that is more comprehensive than CMAT.

Michael Starkey
Principal Lecturer in Marketing
Leicester Business School
De Montfort University

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 28-Sep-2005 12:10 AM
Maarten, Nienke

I am not so sure that the answer is so simple.

CMAT is a comprehensive assessment tool that requires significant investment in either using an accredited assessor for a minimum of 10 days (the CMAT Healthcheck), or in learning the CMAT approach itself by reading QCi's "Management Scorecard" book and then in adapting it to suit your own requirements. Take a look at the Publications and White Papers sections of the QCI website and you will find a number of very informative articles on the CMAT approach and QCi's "State of the Nation" research into effective CRM (at http://qci.co.uk/public_face/Default.asp)

It all depends upon what you want to do with your CRM Audit.

It may be that you want to make the investment in learning CMAT, but it may be that you need something less comprehensive that you can develop yourself from a combination of the CMAT and other approaches, your own knowledge and what you know about ABN AMRO's situation. In my experience, when it comes to CRM Audit's, "less is often more".

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that De Montfort University is listed on the QCi website as a linked academic institution that uses the QCi approach as the foundation of some of its academic courses.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

John Turnbull
Member

Posted 19-Jul-2006 06:05 PM
We have investigated CMAT recently and found that there are now several levels of assessment available, ranging from a 2-week Healthcheck to a full assessment spanning 6 weeks.

John Turnbull
CRM Consultant
www.customerconnect.com.au

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 20-Jul-2006 12:19 AM
The more that I look at this tricky area, the more I come to the conclusion that the QCi CMAT tool has fallen behind current thinking in CRM.

A CRM audit tool needs a number of thing:

It needs a comprehensive view of the different CRM capabilities that a business needs to succeed. Today, these capabilities must also include customer co-creation which is rapidly evolving as the next evolutionary iteration of CRM.

It also need a view of how complementary capabilities at distinct levels of maturity sit together in families that enable a business to create value. The failure of many CRM projects after the implementation of CRM systems is largely due to the failure to understand this view in detail.

It also needs a view of how the different capabilities deliver against the outcomes required by customers and create financial value for shareholders.

And last but not least, it also needs a view of how these things are stitched together over the end-to-end customer lifecycle. What is now euphemistically known as Customer Experience Management. This is the actual playground where value is created, played out over the lifetime of the customer.

Of all the audits that I have looked at, the most complete one is that developed by David Rance at the UK company Round. Having talked with David recently about his future development plans, I know that he is keen to keep the audit in line with current and future developments in CRM.

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Customer Connect Australia lists itself as a QCi CMAT partner on their website.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Customer Value Management Guru at CRMGuru