Liz Roche

The impact of this month’s theme, “Using Technology to Power-up Customer Management,” on IT organizations is not trivial. While it’s all well and good to plan a CRM technology “ecosystem” (a reference architecture to us technologists), the fact remains that CRM is just one of many priorities challenging the IT agenda. Indeed CRM is a challenge, but it’s not the biggest challenge in IT today. That award goes to the general category called “the business value of IT.”

Among other trends, limited financial resources has put IT organizations in the interesting position of having to demonstrate they provide “business value” to the enterprise at large. I find this fascinating because I truly believe that not every IT initiative has measurable, direct business value. Now don’t get me wrong - I can persuasively argue both sides of this conversation and convince you that: (1) without direct business enablement, a particular technology initiative should not be on the IT docket;...

I think most of us would agree that a customer strategy often involves technology enablement. The thing is, the urban legends around CRM technology failures persist. Sure, most technologists will tell you that CRM projects have some risk not present in other back-office oriented projects (e.g., customer exposure, needing to herd sales and marketing cats). But CRM projects are not THAT different from other large scale enterprise implementations in terms of the required blocking and tackling. Us pundits tend to have lots of ideas about how to risk-proof CRM technology projects, but I don’t hear a lot of advice relative what, to me, is the most important risk-mitigating element: how the (often virtual) program team works together.

To that end, I’d like to share my CRM project special sauce: gestalt. For those not familiar with this notion, gestalt according to Webster’s is “…a structure, arrangement, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so...

If we want to create employee fans who will then “sell” to end customers, then we need to make actually turn those employees into fans! And that’s not so easy when it comes to IT.

It’s a fact (at least in my mind) that IT projects with good project management get better results than projects with poor or no project management. Can we say the same for CRM? In other words, if IT projects employ CRM techniques, will there be a better outcome? I say YES!

We need to recognize that most IT projects support many types of “customers” ranging from the external customer to internal users, and not the least of which is the company itself. Further, if we believe that CRM is a business strategy where the customer — not a particular technology, business unit, department or function — is the focal point, then we must embed CRM strategies into our project plans. My experience repeatedly demonstrates that applying CRM principles to projects yields far superior results. To this...

When clients ask me about global CRM, it's almost always in the context of software: Which applications support "internationalization," with features such as double-byte character sets, UI translations, on-demand workflow and flexible currency tables? Sometimes a client will even go so far as to wonder about the data implications of global CRM, especially when the goal is to have a global customer master. While these are all good questions, they're not the right questions to successfully enable global CRM.

I recently worked with an insurance industry trade group whose membership consisted of insurance companies around the world. Its member companies in China had requested some education on CRM, and this group, based in the United States, engaged me to review a "CRM in the insurance industry" training program. I tried to help the group understand that its educational concepts needed to reach beyond "CRM in the insurance industry" to examine "CRM in the insurance industry...