TAMING YOUR CRM
Are you driving a strong return on investment from your CRM? Are you using your CRM to increase the value proposition delivered by your research organization? Below are three best practices to harness your CRM to drive more robust insights.
Learn who holds the CRM keys
CRM buyers and day-to-day users vary depending on enterprise size and individual company governance structure. Some rely more heavily on a traditional, IT-focused ownership, while others have shifted to more of a data scientist-based CRM owner. Regardless, market researchers should seek out these experts and build relationships with their appropriate colleagues – since we have yet to see a CRM system that was owned and operated within a market research domain.
Building these relationships will pay dividends on everything from definitional issues (e.g., how is revenue per customer specifically calculated?) to interpretation (e.g., why do we see a drop in transactions for Europe in Q2?) to the execution of potential future enhancements (e.g., wouldn’t it be nice if we could reach beyond current customer contacts, we could correct customer relationship issues more rapidly).
Keep it clean
To truly optimize any CRM, it needs to be up-to-date and accurate (no kidding, right?). However, we have seen more clients with problems in this area than clients who have solved for this concern. Typically, CRM enhancement is NOT a responsibility of the market research function, but along with our clients, we face challenges and frustrations of incomplete data, outdated data, and simply wrong data when using CRM sources for research study sample. We have created several tools that were born out of necessity to help address these concerns and serve the purpose of CRM enhancement. Specifically, KS&R helps clients define, validate and consolidate the following areas:
Account Taxonomy – understanding account hierarchy (parent/child), classification (theater, vertical, targeted/non-targeted), tenure, performance, etc. can be key to aggregating CRM data and addressing issues.
Sample Validation – we have created the ability to tie-in directly to CRM processes and take our current records (or pieces of records), ‘round-trip’ those records with the appropriate business owner for updates, clarification, etc. and then return that record back to the CRM system, through a relatively simple user interface.
CRM Consolidation – we work with clients who are running multiple CRM systems, and use our tools to merge those feeds in order to create a non-duplicated view to the business owner for updating and editing.
Shift perspective from tracking to insights and engagement
Initially, many look at CRM as a bean counting mechanism – e.g., how many sales calls did this rep make in a particular month, conversion or close rates, how many ‘widgets’ are purchased by certain types of customers, etc. All of this is fine (and in some cases necessary) but this should only be the start, not the entirety of your CRM capabilities. A properly functioning CRM system can also help evaluate the health of the customer relationship across several dimensions: product, account team, partners, support, services, operations, information sources, etc. It can capture not only customer ratings, but also how those ratings compare to best performing experiences, and what steps customers prescribe to close the gap.
A further discussion of KS&R Customer Engagement insights can be found at:
http://www.ksrinc.com/thought-leadership/pdf/2016/KSR_Making_Loyalty_Happen.pdf