For anyone who may have been oblivious to it before, hopefully the widely publicised recent demise of Thomas Cook highlights that you can’t run an analogue business model in a digital world. Due to cutthroat competition and new market entrants, especially when it’s difficult to differentiate yourself through your service offering, if you don’t provide customers with what they need and how they want to consume it, you’ll be left in the dark ages. Thomas Cook paid the ultimate price for not adapting their business model to the changing ways of the modern holidaymaker.

At the other end of the spectrum, only this week, Starling Bank announced it is moving beyond the mobile to add an online banking option for its 66,000 business and sole trader account customers, with the online option extended to personal and joint account holders at a later date. All of this as a reaction to their customers demanding even more flexibility to bank the way that best suits them. Some may see this as a backward step, however, if they are giving their customers exactly what they need they will dramatically reduce the risk of losing them to a competitor and potentially entice others to them.

The finance market is as tough as you get, and in order to gain that competitive edge and win more business, it is imperative that you need to enrich your customer experience for both new and existing customers. To this end, the role of the CRM has never been more important. However, for many organisations it probably won’t be an out of the box solution or the time served platform you started off with which has now had its day, that will drive your business forward. Nor should be seen purely as a sales and marketing tool (which It can be very good at) but rather it needs to embrace the whole organisations and be able to deliver a single customer view across all departments.

Having a smooth and speedy application process is a given nowadays, but this can only truly occur with intelligent integration to help the decision-making process go above and beyond the information that is directly provided. Combine this with effective compliance around regulations, such as identifying and assessing vulnerability and using trended data to support predictive analytics to make customers aware of potential issues before they recognises it themselves, it’s easy to see how effective customer data management is essential to provide you with the insight to make the right business decisions.

When combined with self-service portals (for customers, suppliers or referral/broker partners), you can also provide the ability to quickly access and receive information without direct involvement from your business. Your website, mobile app, customer portal, and physical location should all be in-sync with one another which aligns with new expectations for companies to provide a streamlined experience across all channels. And all of this is driven by real-time information held within your CRM. When portals are planned and implemented appropriately, they have a positive impact on your organisation’s productivity and customer satisfaction. A good self-service portal delivers tangible benefits to service desks, end users and the business as a whole.

However, new systems do come at a cost and the reality of business today (and everyday) is that there is continuous pressure to deliver more services at a lower cost. This results in companies often being forced to make difficult judgements about where to spend their budgets. Projects become delayed or even cancelled because of the initial cost of deployment, or requirements are stripped back to meet a specific budget. However, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Find out where you currently stand with our Financial Services CRM Maturity Assessment which has been designed to help organisations unlock the existing hidden potential by providing a comprehensive audit of your current CRM capabilities. Or, alternative through our CRM CheckmArrk™ service, we can undertake a more detailed independent review of your system, reporting back across our Five Point Model, identifying quick win system or process improvements that will deliver immediate business returns and a recommendations plan of how to maximise benefits in the short and long term.

For anyone who may have been oblivious to it before, hopefully the widely publicised recent demise of Thomas Cook highlights that you can’t run an analogue business model in a digital world. Due to cutthroat competition and new market entrants, especially when it’s difficult to differentiate yourself through your service offering, if you don’t provide customers with what they need and how they want to consume it, you’ll be left in the dark ages. Thomas Cook paid the ultimate price for not adapting their business model to the changing ways of the modern holidaymaker.

At the other end of the spectrum, last week Starling Bank announced it is moving beyond the mobile to add an online banking option for its 66,000 business and sole trader account customers, with the online option extended to personal and joint account holders at a later date. All of this as a reaction to their customers demanding even more flexibility to bank the way that best suits them. Some may see this as a backward step, however, if they are giving their customers exactly what they need they will dramatically reduce the risk of losing them to a competitor and potentially entice others to them.

In order to gain a competitive edge and win more business, it is imperative that you need to enrich your customer experience for both new and existing customers. To this end, the role of the CRM has never been more important. However, for many organisations it probably won’t be an out of the box solution or the time served platform you started off with which has now had its day, that will drive your business forward. Nor should be seen purely as a sales and marketing tool (which It can be very good at) but rather it needs to embrace the whole organisations and be able to deliver a single customer view across all departments.

Having a smooth and speedy customer engagement process is a given nowadays, but this can only truly occur with intelligent integration to help the decision-making process go above and beyond the information that is directly provided. Combine this with effective compliance around regulations and using trended data to support predictive analytics to make customers aware of potential issues before they recognises it themselves, it’s easy to see how effective customer data management is essential to provide you with the insight to make the right business decisions.

When combined with self-service portals (for customers, suppliers or partners), you can also provide the ability to quickly access and receive information without direct involvement from your business. Your website, mobile app, customer portal, and physical location should all be in-sync with one another which aligns with new expectations for companies to provide a streamlined experience across all channels. And all of this is driven by real-time information held within your CRM. When portals are planned and implemented appropriately, they have a positive impact on your organisation’s productivity and customer satisfaction. A good self-service portal delivers tangible benefits to service desks, end users and the business as a whole.

However, new systems do come at a cost and the reality of business today (and everyday) is that there is continuous pressure to deliver more services at a lower cost. This results in companies often being forced to make difficult judgements about where to spend their budgets. Projects become delayed or even cancelled because of the initial cost of deployment, or requirements are stripped back to meet a specific budget. However, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Find out where you currently stand with our CRM Maturity Assessment which has been designed to help organisations unlock the existing hidden potential by providing a comprehensive audit of your current CRM capabilities. Or, alternative through our CRM CheckmArrk™ service, we can undertake a more detailed independent review of your system, reporting back across our Five Point Model, identifying quick win system or process improvements that will deliver immediate business returns and a recommendations plan of how to maximise benefits in the short and long term.

Having recently talked to several companies about their CRM systems, I’ve been astonished by the amount of people who said that their CRM wasn’t helping them to do their job better – and some even admitted having to come up with ways to work around it. And the one element of commonality about all these discussions was, that in their opinion, the blame lay entirely with the system.

Working in marketing for more years than I care to remember, I have used several different CRM systems. And while some were better than others, I’ve always found that they improved the way the marketing team operated with the insight it gave us to what was working and what wasn’t, being invaluable. Which got me thinking – have I just been lucky or is there a recipe for CRM success?

Now, I am not a CRM expert as I stated earlier, but I have been an end user for many years. Having moved to my current employer, Arrk, just over 6 months ago (who among other things develop CRMs for companies), it’s only now that I’ve seen the power that a CRM can bring to the whole company – for example I didn’t know that CRMs such as Microsoft Dynamics have Case Management modules! And even though I was already an advocate, I have found out that I haven’t been using it to its full potential.

There are several blogs/articles out there about the benefits a CRM can bring to a company. So, I thought I would take a slightly different approach, and because of the war stories that are out there, address a few of the reasons that I’ve come across as to why companies are NOT looking to invest in a CRM.

Excuse 1 – ‘I have used a CRM before and it was rubbish’

A previous bad experience is probably the most quoted reason why CRMs are dismissed. This goes back to my initial observation, where the system was being blamed for poor performance and not how it had been configured and launched within the business. Yes, there are CRMs on the market that may not be fit for purpose, but many are. However, they are a piece of software and should not be expected to work straight out of the box. Implementing a CRM should be considered as introducing a customer centric strategy, not a software tool. It needs to be moulded around business processes and should be a cross-functional initiative, not just seen as a sales or marketing tool. If your business does not treat the CRM in this way, it is doomed to fail – but is that the system’s fault?

Excuse 2 – ‘We need results now and can’t wait for it to be implemented’

The decision to implement a CRM should be to improve your business and not a knee jerk reaction to under-performance. But in fact, the preparation you should undertake before you implement a CRM will have an instant positive impact on your business too. The fundamental principal of a CRM is that it should reflect your customer journey, and the business processes for each element of the journey should be established and replicated within the system. By reviewing your current ‘as is’ processes and challenging their validity with regards to delivering the optimum customer experience, you will identify how they can be improved and can then implement these changes straight away. As well as preventing individuals from doing their own thing, an effective business process also standardises best practice, which results in a consistent customer approach – giving an uplift in customer experience which will impact performance.

Excuse 3 – ‘The sales team won’t use it as they think it’s just there to manage their performance’

This could actually refer to any user as a lack of adoption is probably the main reason why CRM projects fail. People can be suspicious of technology and systems, resulting in a ‘big brother is watching us’ mentality. This could be because employees see it as a way for management to use CRM stats solely as a performance ‘metric’ (again not the system’s fault), but also because end users have not been involved in the project from the start and the system has been delivered to them with minimal training and support. The focus then becomes what the system does and not why the system was introduced. If you take sales as an example, the CRM should enable individuals to be much more effective with elements such as lead scoring and next steps prompts supporting the sales process and increasing conversion rates. Gaining an understanding of what types of leads convert the best also opens conversations with marketing colleagues, as you start to work more closely together in refining your target audience. Including influential people in the project team that get to see the bigger picture and have some input into the design structure, will often prompt them to champion the CRM within their own team and help drive adoption across their peer group.

Excuse 4 – ‘We have people all around the country and out on the road, so it won’t get updated’

This is actually one of the major benefits of having a centralised CRM system, as it’s accessible through whatever device a user wants to use e.g. a desktop, laptop, mobile etc. Not having everyone under one roof is often the excuse given as to why multiple different systems, spreadsheets, scraps of paper etc are used to store customer data. This results in a load of duplication and customers complaining that people in the company don’t know what each other is doing. Worse of all it runs the risk of a sales person leaving and other team members not knowing what leads they were working on, where an opportunity is up to, or even who they were speaking to! People can now sit in their car, on a train, at home or in an office and have real-time access to every individual customer interaction and update the information there and then. Emails can be automatically synced against contacts and workflows can be introduced that alert people in multiple departments based on the outcome of meeting/call etc. Managed effectively, CRMs bring people together regardless of where they are on a daily basis, which can only be a good thing.

I am not trying to belittle the investment a company needs to make (both financially and resource wise) to deliver a successful CRM strategy, quite the contrary! I believe that like a dog, a CRM is for life and not just for Christmas. However, I have experienced first hand the benefits a CRM can deliver and am now aware that there is far more potential still to unlock. It would be great to hear your own experiences, the good, the bad and the ugly, and if you are interested, we have a free online CRM maturity assessment and other CRM related insights on our website that you may find interesting.

Richard Leech

Head of Marketing

No one undertakes a CRM implementation with the intention of failing. However, according to Gartner, “55% of CRM initiatives fail to meet measurable business objectives” and other failure reports continue to repeat themselves year after year with failure rates “between 47% and 63%” for new CRM implementations.

These numbers make a lot of would-be CRM adopters understandably nervous. After all, CRM is not cheap. It’s easy to look at the failure rates and see CRM implementation as (at best) a gamble rather than an investment.

But CRM failure isn’t simply a bad throw of the dice. CRM failure is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what CRM is, does, and requires. Too frequently, it’s treated like a magic wand that’ll wave away all the problems facing companies in this digital age.

The overarching strategy to prevent these recurring CRM failures is risk management. Every CRM project brings with it a certain amount of risk, and every failed one incurred a risk that was either not recognised or not addressed.

Therefore, at Arrk we’ve established our Ten Commandments for CRM Success. While impossible to eliminate all risk or anticipate all the challenges that may occur during implementation, these ten commandments will significantly increase the likelihood that big problems won’t occur, and that concerns will be dealt with before they become an issue.

1 – Have a clear vision

A successful CRM implementation begins with clearly defined objectives. What problems are you addressing? What specific, measurable goals are you trying to reach? Where do you want your company to be as a result of your project? Your vision establishes the purpose of your project and guides your strategy. It’s impossible to achieve goals that haven’t been clearly established. Start with the end in mind.

2 – Gain Executive sponsorship

For the best chance of success, everyone involved with the process needs to be on board. While your sales and marketing departments may be able to easily grasp the value of a CRM, the advantages might not be as obvious to others. This can even apply to executives, who may focus more on the costs of a new CRM than on the benefits. A CRM system should be the primary technology enabler in the company’s quest for customer and revenue growth. It’s not enough for the C-Suite planners to acquiesce trying out a CRM, they need to be 100% behind it. The better their understanding of the value the CRM brings to the company, the more invested they’ll become in its long-term success.

3 – Don’t approach CRM as just a technology

CRM is not strictly an IT project. While software has become an integral part of successful CRM implementations, software is merely a tool. CRM should be an enterprise-wide initiative to improve customer-facing business processes in order to meet company goals. It is a culture change that impacts every employee who comes into contact with customers. That means change must be recognised as necessary and accepted in every customer-facing department across all levels of the company. Therefore, the people who will be using the system need to be involved in all phases of the implementation. Forcing employees to use whatever software and processes IT has chosen for them, is a downhill path to failure.

4 – Clearly define your business processes

Well defined and end to end business processes, based on customer journeys, are needed. This could be an enquiry to loan approval, or even broader processes such as a loan enquiry through to settlement. Once you have an enterprise-wide business process view, you can prioritise and architect process optimisation to reduce friction in processes, decrease business process cycle times, and improve outcomes.

It’s important that you perform process optimisation before you capture your CRM requirements, as new business processes will eliminate many of those requirements and new requirements will be missed if only looking at current ‘as is’ state.

5 – Don’t do too much all at once

Trying to do everything at once creates chaos and confusion rather than the more efficient business processes you imagined at the outset. While you need to develop the CRM structure based on an enterprise-wide view, divide your implementation into phases to make the project more manageable. You can work on multiple aspects of your implementation at the same time. Just don’t try to complete the entire enterprise-wide implementation all at once.

6 – Invest the time to clean your data

Your CRM software works because it provides insight into the customer data you collect. CRM cannot make corrupt, outdated, or just incorrect data useful. To get meaningful results, your data needs to be as pristine and complete as possible.

Before you start your CRM project, make sure your data as well as the methods you use to collect it are in the best shape and structure as possible. If there’s a problem with how the data is getting into the system due to poor data entry training, nothing you can do to the CRM itself will address this. Instead, you need to retrain workers using best practices.

7 – Involve end users in solution design

Design your CRM around the needs of the people who’ll use it most. A workflow that makes sense to a coder or UX designer might be bafflingly or unintuitive to the salesperson, support desk agent, or data entry worker who has to use that system daily. These end users are often the very people who ultimately determine if a CRM project succeeds or fails. If the system is poorly designed, those users will either avoid using it, or – even worse – use it in a way that makes the process less efficient than not having a CRM in the first place. By bringing these end users into the planning and user-testing stages, these headaches and costs can often be avoided completely.

8 – Integrate to streamline processes and boost productivity

A CRM system needs to provide a holistic customer view, therefore integration with other business applications is essential. In doing so, customer facing staff, line managers, and knowledge workers will all have access to real-time and on-demand customer information, reports and business intelligence – regardless of where the data resides. You’ll not only have better insight into your customer base and customer’s behaviour, you’ll build lasting relationships and can determine areas for future growth. Consistent data gives you better analytics and reporting, helping you to keep track of your customers preferences, profitability, and loyalty. Plus, it gives you a single version of the truth, so there’s no ambiguity to cloud decision making.

9 – Invest in training and support

There’s a virtuous cycle in CRM systems: the more users who adopt the system, the more data will be entered. The more credible the data, the more valuable an asset it is for all users. The more valuable the asset, the easier it is to get more users leveraging, and contributing to the system. Even if some users become spectacularly effective thanks to CRM usage, if you only have pockets of usage you end up with an inconsistent customer experience and failed objectives. It’s imperative that you fully train your team. CRM software can have a steep learning curve, presenting a challenge even for relatively tech-savvy people. Cutting down on training time might be a good way to trim the project’s budget, but in practice it’ll result in low user adoption rates and increased risk of failure. The same is true around support. Your team will always have questions about the system, and your software will inevitably need revisions and tweaks as your business grows and changes.

10 – Champion continuous process improvement

Your company’s quest to acquire more customers, increase customer share and improve customer retention never ends, so neither should your enabling technology. Like business, CRM is a journey, and successful CRM programs leverage continuous process improvement cycles to constantly refine and optimise the business software system. This may take simple forms such as recurring training after new releases or more expansive forms such as CRM Champions in each department.

Even a relatively successful implementation followed by stagnation will result in a steady decline in CRM usage over time. It won’t take long until users and managers believe the CRM software incurs more effort than value, and begin working without or around the system.

To find out how prepared your organisation is for a successful CRM implementation, we can help you establish how ready you are with our readiness assessment – get in touch now.

Many articles around CRM project failures tend to focus on how to avoid them, which is great, but according to industry analysts, year after year multiple reports address the ongoing issue of failure rates. And for CRM implementations alone, failure rates between 47% and 63% were found. Here, we explore what to do if you’re CRM isn’t delivering what you had expected or if you want to achieve more from it.

The benefits of CRM, including enhanced productivity and improved customer satisfaction, have been proven time and again, so why does it fall short of expectations so often? Most of the reasons for failure can be summed up into one resulting cause – the belief that you can simply just buy a customer relationship management solution.

Expecting CRM technology to fix all your customer relationship problems is putting too much demand on one piece of software. CRM software can be a powerful part of a solution, but it is only part of the solution. Developing and cultivating customer relationships requires a supportive business culture and environment, which means more than just buying a new technology application. It often means changing working practices and defining business processes.

Assessing where your CRM system is underperforming

A classic reaction to a failed or underperforming project is to blame the project team, get a new project manager, change consultants or hold a crash course “get-well” program. In extreme cases, the choice of system may be blamed, and management choose to throw out the new system altogether.

Although such reactions are emotionally and politically satisfying, they are typically costly. Worse still, the get-well program usually heads straight down the same path. The key to understand what has gone wrong and how to get things back on track is to identify exactly where the system is not performing as expected, and to understand the root causes to be addressed.

This can be achieved by reviewing your CRM against six basic principles:

1. The system must be customer centric and not product centric
2. The system must adhere to defined business processes
3. The system must be integrated (or replace) other internal applications so that a holistic customer view can be seen across the business
4. The system must provide accurate real-time analytics to measure performance
5. The system must have automation that provides consistencies with your organisation’s best practices
6. The system must be user friendly and improve working practices not hinder them

Arrk’s online CRM Maturity Assessment was designed to help organisations by providing a comprehensive audit of your current CRM capabilities, as well as recommendations and a road-map to drive future success all based on your personal profile.