Get the Most Out of Your CRM

In today’s connected world, continuous optimization of enterprise applications to realize your digital strategy is key.

Get the Most Out of Your CRM

In today’s connected world, continuous optimization of enterprise applications to realize your digital strategy is key.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Focus optimization on organizational value delivery.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are at the core of a customer-centric strategy to drive business results. They are critical to supporting marketing, sales, and customer service efforts.

CRM systems are expensive, their benefits are difficult to quantify, and they often suffer from poor user satisfaction. Post implementation, technology evolves, organizational goals change, and the health of the system is not monitored. This is complicated in today’s digital landscape with multiple integration points, siloed data, and competing priorities.

Too often organizations jump into the selection of replacement systems without understanding the health of their current systems. IT leaders need to stop reacting and take a proactive approach to continually monitor and optimize their enterprise applications. Strategically realign business goals, identify business application capabilities, complete a process assessment, evaluate user adoption, and create an optimization roadmap that will drive a cohesive technology strategy that delivers results.

Lisa Highfield
Research Director,
Enterprise Applications
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

In today’s connected world, continuous optimization of enterprise applications to realize your digital strategy is key.

Enterprise applications often involve large capital outlay and unquantified benefits.

CRM application portfolios are often messy. Add to that poor processes, distributed data, and lack of training – business results and user dissatisfaction is common.

Technology owners are often distributed across the business. Consolidation of optimization efforts is key.

Common Obstacles

Enterprise applications involve large numbers of processes and users. Without a clear focus on organizational needs, decisions about what and how to optimize can become complicated.

Competing and conflicting priorities may undermine optimization value by focusing on the approaches that would only benefit one line of business rather than the entire organization.

Teams do not have a framework to illustrate, communicate, and justify the optimization effort in the language your stakeholders understand.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Build an ongoing optimization team to conduct application improvements.

Assess your CRM application(s) and the environment in which they exist. Take a business-first strategy to prioritize optimization efforts.

Validate CRM capabilities, user satisfaction, issues around data, vendor management, and costs to build out an optimization strategy

Pull this all together to develop a prioritized optimization roadmap.

Info-Tech Insight

CRM implementation should not be a one-and-done exercise. A properly optimized CRM ecosystem will reduce costs and increase productivity.

Insight Summary

Continuous assessment and optimization of customer relationship management (CRM) systems is critical to their success.

• Applications and the environments in which they live are constantly evolving.
• Get the Most Out of Your CRM provides business and application managers a method to complete a health assessment on their CRM systems to identify areas for improvement and optimization.
• Put optimization practices into effect by:
  • Aligning and prioritizing key business and technology drivers.
  • Identifying CRM process classification, and performing a gap analysis.
  • Measuring user satisfaction across key departments.
  • Evaluating vendor relations.
  • Understanding how data fits.
  • Pulling it all together into an optimization roadmap.

CRM platforms are the applications that provide functional capabilities and data management around the customer experience (CX).

Marketing, sales, and customer service are enabled through CRM technology.

CRM technologies facilitate an organization’s relationships with customers, service users, employees, and suppliers.

CRM technology is critical to managing the lifecycle of these relationships, from lead generation, to sales opportunities, to ongoing support and nurturing of these relationships.

Customer experience management (CXM)

CRM platforms sit at the core of a well-rounded customer experience management ecosystem.

Customer Relationship Management

• Web Experience Management Platform
• E-Commerce & Point-of-Sale Solutions
• Social Media Management Platform
• Customer Intelligence Platform
• Customer Service Management Tools
• Marketing Management Suite

Customer relationship management suites are one piece of the overall customer experience management ecosystem, alongside tools such as customer intelligence platforms and adjacent point solutions for sales, marketing, and customer service. Review Info-Tech’s CXM blueprint to build a complete, end-to-end customer interaction solution portfolio that encompasses CRM alongside other critical components. The CXM blueprint also allows you to develop strategic requirements for CRM based on customer personas and external market analysis.

CRM by the numbers

1/3

Statistical analysis of CRM projects indicate failures vary from 18% to 69%. Taking an average of those analyst reports, about one-third of CRM projects are considered a failure.
Source: CIO Magazine, 2017

85%

Companies that apply the principles of behavioral economics outperform their peers by 85% in sales growth and more than 25% in gross margin.
Source: Gallup, 2012

40%

In 2019, 40% of executives name customer experience the top priority for their digital transformation.
Source: CRM Magazine, 2019

CRM dissatisfaction

Info-Tech Insight

While technology is the key enabler of building strong customer experiences, there are many other drivers of dissatisfaction. IT must stand shoulder to shoulder with the business to develop a technology framework for customer relationship management.

Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service, along with IT, can only optimize CRM with the full support of each other. The cooperation of the departments is crucial when trying to improve CRM technology capabilities and customer interaction.

Application optimization is risky without a plan

Avoid the common pitfalls.

• Not considering application optimization as a business and IT partnership that requires continuous formal engagement of all participants.
• Not having a good understanding of current state, including integration points and data.
• Not adequately accommodating feedback and changes after digital applications are deployed and employed.
• Not treating digital applications as a motivator for potential future IT optimization effort, and not incorporating digital assets in strategic business planning.
• Not involving department leads, management, and other subject matter experts to facilitate the organizational change digital applications bring.

“A successful application optimization strategy starts with the business need in mind and not from a technological point of view. No matter from which angle you look at it, modernizing a legacy application is a considerable undertaking that can’t be taken lightly. Your best approach is to begin the journey with baby steps.”
– Ernese Norelus, Sreeni Pamidala, and Oliver Senti
Medium, 2020