Creating a CRM Strategy

Companies need to spend time bringing together the various departments to work through the necessary steps for creating a CRM plan. The project team needs to evaluate the corporate infrastructure to understand its gaps and holes, by looking at what it already has in place and how ready the company is to evolve to a new way of conducting business; the company can create a CRM strategy. The CRM strategy will include detailed recommendations on how the company can achieve their customer-driven goals in support of the overall business strategy.

The 4-stage CRM strategy includes:

1.BUSINESS SYSTEM PLAN - The first step is to create a Business System Plan. A BSP looks at the Company's strategic objectives and determines what systems are needed to support them over the next one to five years. The second step is to conduct an audit, which determines the gap between existing infrastructure and what is needed to meet the corporate objectives.

2.BUSINESS ENVIRONMENTS - Once the business strategy plan has been created, a roadmap to success can be determined. The roadmap is the foundation for the CRM effort. It documents existing process that can be leveraged for the CRM strategy.

3.GAP ANALYSIS - The Gap analysis documents the variance between the existing systems and the CRM strategy, by comparing the existing infrastructure against what is necessary to reach the business objectives, the company can identify a list of requirements. This list is the foundation for the CRM strategy.

4.RECOMMENDATIONS - Recommendations are based on the Gap Analysis and offer suggestions to integrate the CRM strategy into corporate business strategy. The document details the steps necessary for the company to meet its CRM goals. It should detail solid suggestions about current gaps and a list of evaluation criteria.

The implementation of a successful CRM strategy hinges on a number of factors such as; Legacy systems, integration of existing data to all areas of

your business and company directives are vital components to CRM. All companies have in the last decade acquired various marketing, sales, financial and service applications. Employees have become confident within these applications and a radical change would mean re-training and the possibility losing valuable business. These entire legacy systems should, as much as possible, be taken into consideration when investigating potential CRM applications. Prior to investigating CRM applications, the integration and migration of all existing data into a single database should be undertaken, thus allowing all company users access to the same centrally stored data. Failure in doing so will most certainly result in the creation of double entry data and time-consuming extraction situations. All of these however are technology driven problems, but the single biggest problem facing any CRM implementation is company directives. The directive for a CRM system should become holistic - a company ethos, from product to customer centric. This has to come from the top right down to the bottom of any company wishing to undergo the transformation. Although creating a CRM strategy takes time and resources, a company will realise benefits during the strategy completion as issues are identified and fixed. A strong CRM strategy can provide your company with a strategic advantage that will keep your customers coming back.

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