Taking the BS out of CRM

Summary
Any business wanting to use software to improve customer relationships won’t find a silver bullet in any package software.  It’ll only find it in software tools that let the business work the way it wants to, and not get in the way.  It’ll only be successful if it enables, as opposed to contrains, the people who interface with customers.

Detail
In case you hadn’t noticed the software industry in all its dimensions is full of BS.

This has been so for a long time, but the BS reached a crescendo in the late 90′s when the “millenium bug” reared its head and got together with Business Process Re-engineering to create a perfect storm.

The big consulting and software firms (particularly SAP) used the cover of this storm to blind the corporate world with flashing lights – one the one hand the fear of a total collapse of systems, and on the other the promise of more control over operations at lower cost.  Together they put a lot of solutions companies out of business, and made shed loads of cash in the process.

Of course it was all BS.  In the majority of cases the “bug” wouldn’t be a problem. In even more cases operational systems dictated by bean counters in head office proved disastrous for the operating companies.  Most of the consulting firms are now out of that business, but SAP continues almost unencumbered by competition.

Once all the fuss died down after January 2000 the ERP market was stuffed.  The BC peddlers needed to find something else to fool the world with, and they did – CRM.

Over the last decade CRM has become THE topic for IT guys and consultants trying to create jobs for themselves.  The sales functions were the only parts of the business the beancounters and IT departments hadn’t yet managed to interfere with.  This created a bandwagon which now batters us from every direction – “You’ve just got to have CRM.”

Despite inummerable stories of failed projects, the band wagon rolls on.  The success of salesforce.com has encouraged more start ups than we can count.  Internet technologies have made it easy for anybody to get into supplying SaaS CRM, and even easier for others to become experts by blogging about it.  CRM has become the natural home of the BS merchants.

For all those hard working people trying to find a way of improving sales performance and increasing customer satisfaction, but confused by the BS, here are some facts.

• CRM isn’t a technology, or even a software package.  It’s a philosophy.  Managing relationships with customers has always been fundamental to successful business.  It didn’t suddenly appear in 2000.

• Until the beancounters and IT “witch doctors” got involved, managing relationships with customers was left to the experts – sales reps, account directors, business owner managers.  These were the people who understood how to do it, and still are.  Beancounters and software marketing aren’t.  This is why CRM projects fail so regularly – with amateurs dictating to professionals.

• No two businesses are the same (don’t tell SAP, please) so the chances of there being a single, best software solution for every business don’t exist. Anybody who has a CRM system just right for your business will go bust, because you’re the only customer.

• Managing customer relationships is an extremely complex task, unless you sell hot dogs.  Every customer will be different and require individual interactions.  This isn’t simple.  Any CRM solution claiming to be simple has missed the point.  Anybody claiming to offer a “simple” CRM system doesn’t know what he’s talking about – probably a beancounter, marketer or programmer.

• Managing customer relationships isn’t a stand alone function.  The systems needed to support the roles have to be a fundamental component of business operations.  If the relationship isn’t tied into planning, scheduling and review of the end to end process customers will be divorced from the delivery and service mechanisms.

Conclusion – any business wanting to use software to improve customer relationships won’t find a silver bullet in any package software.  It’ll only find it in software tools that let the business work the way it wants to, and not get in the way.  It’ll only be successful if it enables, as opposed to contrains, the people who interface with customers.

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Tagged as: Business, Cloud computing, Customer relationship management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Marketing