With so many Customer Relationship Management vendors making similar promises -- and with some even offering solutions that are on the bleeding edge -- companies may have a difficult time discerning which provider to ink a deal with.
How do you choose the best CRM solution for your company? And, taking it a step further, how do you implement that solution in the most effective, efficient way possible? Those are the types of questions Green Beacon Solutions helps its clients answer. Green Beacon recently offered some CRM selection and implementation best practices on the Microsoft Dynamics blog that are worth review.
Among the best practices are: get upper-management sponsorship, stakeholder participation, pick your CRM team wisely, determine success metrics, define business objectives, customer identification, customer understanding, customer-strategy integration , data and map requirements and standardized data, create customer engagement programs, collect data, monitor and adjust the customer experience, evaluation and purchase, and communicate.
Articulate the Customer Experience
Let's dive into the lesser-explored best practices, such as customer differentiation, customer understanding, and customer experience goal definition. Green Beacon Solutions suggests further identifying your customers by defining segments -- your high-value and high-potential customers: "Know who you want to serve. Understand what that customer wants? Prioritize. What is the customer worth and what is their potential worth to the company?"
On the customer understanding front, Green Beacon says it's a matter of understanding what they want and how they want it from you. Then there's the all-important customer experience goal definition.
"You and your company are the users, but the solution is about your customer. Articulate the customer experience," Green Beacon suggests. "How should their experience feel? Identify important business interactions, e.g. high volume or high cost. Identify interactions that are important to the customer -- high involvement and high perceived importance."
Consider Customer Cycles
What about customer strategy integration? Green Beacon argues that interactive marketing is a fragmented discipline in which marketers work with many different vendors to develop and execute marketing programs. It's up to each individual company, then, to recognize that disparate databases of customer information prevent companies from gaining a holistic view of the customer throughout the organization.
