8.1. Answering the Three Key Questions
Where do you want to go? Where are you starting? How are you going to get there? These are the three questions that the strategic planning process will help you answer so you can successfully build your CRM program. Figure 8-2 reminds us of the three vectors that shape the customer experience: what's happening in the marketplace, what your company says, and what your company does. To get the answers, you'll be gathering information from (or about) the marketplace (customers and competitors) and from inside your company (from key executives and employees who have significant customer experience and knowledge).
Figure 8-2. The customer experience
There are two reasons to take a trip: (1) you want to get somewhere, and (2) you want to see and experience new scenery. If you're just out for a ride, you don't really need to plan a destination, take a map, or even choose a direction. But we are trying to get somewhere; we want to move to a place where our company is capable of building and managing excellent customer relationships so that we can consistently increase loyalty and revenue. The first thing that we must do is figure out where we want to be at the end of our efforts.
8.1.1. Where Do You Want to Go?
The most important deliverable of the strategic planning phase is to define what CRM is going to do for your company; you need to paint a vision of what the future will look like. This goal is what will keep your program on track over the long haul needed to achieve you goals. Remember, there is no CRM nirvana that all companies must strive to reach.
The primary source of input for determining your organization's CRM goal should come from outside the organization. CRM is about your customers. What do your customers want, need, or expect? What is most important to them? You don't want to waste your time and resources on capabilities that your customers don't care about. Of course, no one can afford to give customers everything they ever thought of wanting. A customer survey is a key step, but we must balance it with information about our own value discipline and our position relative to our competition. We also need to understand how our company compares to our competitors: Do we excel, do we have parity, or are we behind? After all, why focus on areas where we're already doing better than the competition? Finally, and obviously, you want to be sure to include the key internal players and CRM constituents. As ideal as it sounds, we can't do everything that customers want. We need to balance customer expectations against the reality of our company's business objectives and plans. The internal interview will allow you to uncover information that will help you put a realistic boundary around your future vision and to answer questions such as these:
Is your CRM strategy aligned with your overall corporate strategy and business model? If not, you must get it aligned or quit now.
How internally aligned is the organization around your company's goals? Your chance of success is greatly increased by a strongly aligned organization, but if yours isn't, now is your chance to do the alignment.
What are your potential program risks? Answering this question allows you to prepare for and eliminate obstructions to successful completion.
Does your company know who your customers are? What industries, what size, and what other segments are important? You can't build relationships with customers if you don't even know what they are.
What are the organization's expectations of CRM? If they aren't reasonable or consistent, you can prepare to clarify them.
I want to emphasize the first point: I strongly recommend that you stop your efforts right now if you discover that there is no congruence between what CRM can deliver and your organization's strategic goals. I'm quite serious. Because CRM must cross functions if it is to have any real impact on the customer experience, a lack of company-wide goals means that you cannot be successful. That is not to say that you couldn't decide to implement a call center management system that could be very helpful to customers who use that particular service function. But no matter what the vendor tells you, if the program isn't fully integrated across all the front office functions, it is not Customer Relationship Management.
If you insist on proceeding with a formal, cross-functional program without clear alignment with your organization's business goals, you will end up like Sisyphus in Figure 8-3, forever struggling to push a boulder uphill and never quite reaching your destination. Nothing is more frustrating or painful than having the boulder roll back down over you time and again.
Figure 8-3. If there's no link between CRM and your company strategy, you'll find yourself here!
Of course, the internal interviews can actually help you avoid the Sisyphus syndrome. While you are gathering information internally, you have an excellent opportunity to educate the organization about CRM and what to expect. You also have the chance to adapt and align your CRM message with the overall company goals. You will want to gather perspectives from all the CRM functions: marketing, sales, customer services, and product support and from all levels within these organizations. Executives have a great perspective on overall company direction and realities of the marketplace. Individuals such as sales reps and customer service and support reps who work closely with customers often have a greater understanding of your customers and their current company experience.
Although you probably have a pretty good idea of what needs to happen, you will learn much from the internal interviews that will help you set the right strategy and align with company goals. But the single most important result of this effort is getting your key constituents involved in the program early.
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After you've figured out where you are going, it's important to understand where you are now.
8.1.2. Where Are You Starting?
The three data collection tools we used to determine our goals are also helpful for gathering information about where we are today. We will ask both long-term direction and current-state questions of everyone we interview. Senior executives are most likely to provide perspective on long-term direction, while current-state information will most likely come from those individuals who directly interact with and are closest to the customer.
Because of the key role that technology plays in CRM, we also need to get a snapshot of the current information and systems technology state of the company. We need to ask project managers and IT management these questions:
What customer information and systems do we already have running?
What customer information/systems projects are underway?
What customer information/systems projects are being planned?
We will find out who is funding these projects, what they do, what kind of information are already in-house, etc. Project assessments can become political nightmares because many people fear that their pet project will be taken over or canceled. Many disconnected systems result from the widespread belief by IT folks that the only way to get something done is to do it themselves. The result, of course, is fragmentation. Fragmentation costs your company more (small amounts of money invested often enough add up to a large total), and each small project solves the same problem over and over; you never get to some of the bigger and higher impact projects.
In fact, it is likely that you'll uncover some projects that you'll decide to eliminate or combine. But that is not the purpose of the system assessment, and your message introducing the survey must convey that strongly. The message must be about helping the customer, about understanding the ways that we currently touch our customers, and about being able to take advantage of all the knowledge we gain from these interactions to improve the customer's experience and loyalty and our revenue. If the message is about cost-cutting or control, people will feel threatened and become uncooperative. If that's what people think you're doing, you can depend on every project suddenly disappearing underground. This is a common danger and is typified by the agreeable non-complier: “Yes, I agree, it just doesn't apply to me/my function/my project.”
The answers to this second question will give us a complete picture of the company's current situation in the areas that are key to CRM success. We will understand the company's current state: strategic alignment, customer focus, CRM understanding, program risks, and CRM information and systems (current and planned).
The last step in the strategic plan is to understand the best way to move our organization from where it is now to where we want to be. This plan will also be based on the information we've collected so far.
8.1.3. How Are You Going to Get There?
The final question that we will answer is how to get from where we are now to our future state vision. We will develop a set of plans that will describe the path we'll take starting from today and looking out one to two years. After evaluating all the information you have collected from internal and external sources, you will prepare your CRM strategic proposal. The proposal will be comprised of two parts: the recommendations that describe where you want to be and the plan that describes the route you'll take to get there. One section of your proposal will be built around a project roadmap, governed by your business priorities and supplemented by a risk reduction strategy.
The strategic planning process is accomplished through the use of a set of tools that help us collect information from key stakeholders that will answer the three strategic questions.