Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is often mistakenly looked at as a technology fix for their sales organization. This view has caused many of the failed CRM technology implementations over the past few years. If you'd like to raise your implementation success rate, there are some key guidelines to follow. The first is to have a clear vision of how the technology will improve your customers' experience with your organization.

Your customer relationship vision should be grounded in what you believe your customers want and not how to make your business easier to manage. This often begins with surveys, focus groups and one-on-one interviews with key customers. Once you have compiled and analyzed this information, your customer relationship vision should become clear. Writing your vision should be focused on clarity for both internal and external stakeholders. Now is not the time to open up the thesaurus to see how interesting your words can be portrayed. Stay the course and be crisp and clear with your words.

Executive sponsorship is another key to improving your CRM success rate. Of all the success indicators, this one stands out as the one that can kill a project’s success faster than all of the others combined. You will need strong executive sponsorship throughout the project life cycle to ensure a solid implementation. Typically, to get the executive team on board you will need to present a strong ROI and other benefits to the entire organization. We will discuss in future articles how to present accurate measurements to support your CRM initiatives.

Whatever you do, don’t take for granted the importance of involving the user community in the early stages of the decision process. We recommend that you allow them to have input into the decisions at all stages of the project. This includes, but is not limited to: developing the vision, creating the benefit document for management, developing and presenting the project charter, researching technologies, developing the requirements document, participating in evaluation demonstrations and choosing the technology partner. This will accomplish two major objectives: 1) they will evangelize the project to their peers 2) the system will be designed by them for them to use. This will help increase your rate of user adoption and ultimately greater success in creating a more customer centric organization.

Now that you’ve made the best decision for your organization, don’t drop the ball now. Another key element in raising your success rate is training and education. We say training and education before of the importance of doing both. Training is the teaching of the user community how to perform the required tasks to comply with the developed processes. Often this effort is minimized and results in the user community “learning on their own”. This is not the most desirable outcome of an important investment in CRM processes and technology. Additionally, the education piece of the pie is sometimes left out completely. Education is the explanation of how and why the process is established and what the tasks within the processes are supposed to accomplish. If you’ve ever encountered the instructions in a new electronic device, you would have experienced training. But what if somewhere along the many steps explained in the instructions something didn’t work as expected? What would you do? If you had been educated on the how and why you’d probably have a good chance of figuring out how to make it work, but without it you’d be stuck starting from the beginning again. Not a good situation to be in especially when it comes to someone focused on your customers.

Measure. Measure. Measure. Without clear success measurements how would you know if you’ve achieved your goals? Put measurements in place to keep everyone on track, to know where you’re headed and logically to know when you’ve arrived. We suggest to our clients that they should develop a clear implementation plan, we call it their “roadmap to results” and to build metrics that keep them focused on where they are headed. These measurements should be utilized to manage your project plan. This will help both internal and external stakeholders in keeping their eyes on the ball. At the end of the day, your hard work is designed to produce results. Let’s know what the results should be before you get started. That will help everyone prioritize their time for the betterment of the organization.

If you follow all of these guidelines, you will have a much better chance of successfully implementing a customer focused CRM solution that is good for both your customer and your organization. Isn’t that what it’s all about?