Front Office Box

In this morning’s newsletter AMR Research suggests - in its article Social Networking the Front Office - “the elevated failure rates for CRM projects suggests the market is long overdue for a new catalyst to change. Wikis, blogs and social networking have largely been ignored (by CRM suppliers) until recently, some are now looking at these technologies to address the issues of collaboration and community”.

Translation - failing CRM companies will save themselves by including blogs and wikis in their software, because these will encourage people to use it.

It’s easy to understand anybody facing user adoption problems looks to social networking for lessons on getting people engaged. It’s easy to understand why vendors see this as a panacea for failing CRM projects - the next silver bullet. BUT it won’t work; it doesn’t address the real issue.

The real issue is the people involved in the philosophy of Customer Relationship Management don’t understand customers. Customers don’t want to be managed. They want to be supported. Sales people understand customers. They understand Customer Relationship Management is about internal control. What they need is Customer Relationship Support - systems which help them deliver the best they have to offer customers. No wonder there are adoption issues.

Here’s where we get into the difference between internal and external processes. Internal processes are those which the business can dictate, because they only impact on internal resources - accounting, HR, manufacturing etc. External processes are those which impact on external resources and cannot be dictated internally. They have to be flexible so the business can interface with other customers and partners processes.

Sales and customer service guys provide this flexibility to protect customers from the control of the internal systems.

CRM projects fail because they enforce internal processes, not enable external processes. How can we make a salesman, who typically gets paid on his success, use a system which gets in the way of that success? This is the real adoption problem and wiki’s and blogs won’t solve it.

Customer Relationship Support applications need to recognize the infinite variables involved in the customer/service/salesman/business equation, and the impossibility of predetermining inputs, processes and outputs for every potential combination. They also need to recognize the different styles of individual sales people and the impossibility of building systems which enable capability whilst enforcing process. They need to be capable and flexible, not rigid and enforcing.

Externally focused people get around the limitations of internal systems by using office software to create their own mini applications. The real sales forecast is in the Excel sheet, the customer correspondence is in Outlook folders and the real documents are in Windows folders. This works for the individual. He can pretty much find what he needs, when he needs it. He can “manage” the information which gets though to the bureaucracy. He can control the relationship with the customer, because he’s the only one with the whole picture. More importantly he doesn’t have to spend hours creating records that add no value. Instead he can get on with delivering to his customers and achieving for his employer.

So what gets put into the CRM system? Not much of any value - hence the failure of these projects This is a disaster for everybody because there’s no opportunity for sharing and collaboration, and the security of this corporate data is minimal. Let the sales guy go and he wipes his computer disk before he leaves the office. Leave the laptop on a plane and all the customer information is left with it. Hardware or software failure means business stops.

These are all the reasons why we built Front Office Box. It lets the sales guy work the way he wants to, without getting in his way. At the same time it makes the information available to everybody for collaboration and secures it. We’re including blogs, wikis and forums in Front Office Box, but we’re not doing it to solve a problem, we’re doing to create value.

We’ve been struggling for some time with the question of what we call Front Office Box. If we call it CRM there’s a danger we’ll get bracketed with all the failed projects. Maybe we should call it Customer Relationship Support (CRS) because that’s exactly what it does.

October 22nd, 2007 - Posted in Front Office Box, Our market  |  Add a Comment