Avoiding Customer Relationship Management pitfalls

Products designed to automate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) processes have brought new life into the service industry.

Companies are rushing to automate their CRM activities - from assembling marketing materials to tracking customers' histories to coordinating a company's interactions with its customers.

But the vendors that are eager to offer CRM systems have not yet been able to achieve this level of integration, and companies often underestimate the effort it takes to implement them, according to publication Computerworld.

CRM is an ongoing process

Automating CRM is a continuous process, a business strategy, which cannot be implemented overnight. It takes multiple technologies and multiple vendors to achieve this.

Experts say that a company must first review the processes, applications and technologies it uses to deal with customers and that it should consider its schedule, budget and long-term goals it hopes to achieve with a CRM application.

The main focus of a CRM system targets sales, customer service and marketing. As for sales, the system addresses the area of field sales, call centre telephone sales, third-party brokers, retail and e-commerce. Customer service includes Internet-based services and call centre services. Marketing automation includes data-cleansing tools, data analysis and business intelligence tools, content management applications and a campaign management system.

Depending on your goals, the technology involved with CRM automation can include databases, data warehouses, servers, telephony system and software for business intelligence, workflow management and e-commerce.

In order to combine all these aspects into a coherent system, you may have to call in the help of a systems integrator. Remember, doing this will also involve having to train everyone in your company -- from IT employees to telephone representatives to sales people.

According to experts, in general, small- and medium-sized companies in the service industry have been able to implement more complete CRM systems because they are more willing to implement an application and adapt their business processes accordingly, as opposed to larger companies, which try to adapt the application to their processes.

Don't overlook customer service

However, the hype surrounding CRM has created the belief that customer service is no longer necessary. But experts warn that you should be aware that without customer service, there are no customers with whom to form relationships. According to e-commerce expert Alexis Gutzman, CRM is a three-legged table of which service is one supporting leg.

With e-commerce on the rise, businesses tend to assume that only a small fraction of online transactions will result in customer service contacts, most of which will be handled by online self-service facilities. Experts argue that self-service should be a main part of customer service, but that it cannot be regarded as a replacement for human contact.

Instant customer service

Customer service systems are divided in two categories: instant service and delayed service. Experts recommend implementing at least two types of instant service, preferably self-service and assisted service. Self-service can be as simple as a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section or online forum on the company's Web site, whilst assisted service could be a phone help line or online real-time chat facility.

You should not rely on e-mail as a stand-alone solution, unless you can guarantee instant responses, according to Gutzman. And even then, she said, you risk losing customers who need an answer straight away regarding a purchase they just made or are about to make.

However, one of the advantages of e-mail is that it is silent - people often do not want their co-workers to know that they are booking a ticket to their next holiday destination. E-mail also permits customers to include all the relevant information in one place, allowing a customer service representative to address the problem.

To prevent customers from leaving out important information, you could set up an online form that is flexible and personal enough for customers to describe their problems.

After deciding what types of customer service you want to provide, you have to decide how to provide them. According to Gutzman, you can build your own solution or hire a company to provide multi-channel customer service using its own representatives. However, the fastest way to implement customer service improvement is by contracting an Application Service Provider (ASP) to host the applications, such as real-time chat and e-mail processing, and use your own customer service representatives to provide the support.