Posts Tagged ‘CRM’

Book Review: The Best Service is No Service

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

“The Best Service is No Service” by Bill Price and David Jaffe is an excellent book that ought to be compulsory reading for all companies with a customer service element, mostly because so many of them are so very far from providing even reasonable service.

The book gives clear, practical advice and loads of examples of where service has gone wrong and of best practice (plenty of examples from Amazon and first direct for instance in this category).

A few of the most significant points they make are:

  • Good quality self service has major benefits, making it easier for users to do what they want, when they want and significantly reduce operational costs
  • Get rid of unnecessary reasons for people to contact you (”dumb contacts” is the phrase they use in the book) - eliminate contacts that have no value to the customer and no value to the organisation
  • Value those contacts and relationships that are most important to you and have the greatest benefit to the organisation
  • Gather metrics on what people are trying to find out about, both on the website and through calls
  • “Service” is not just the province of a contact / service centre, it is equally important across the whole operation

    • The advice should transform customer experience where it is poor and have a major impact on the bottom line of companies who take notice.

    It is interesting to think about how this impacts on the NFP sector. I think the key issues are:

  • NFP organisations are different from the Amazons and BTs of this world. The relationships with their key stakeholders (particularly members / supporters) are more complex and long term, especially where it forms an important part of their career development or social engagement. This makes the following points even more important.
  • It shows the need for joined-up service, which is likely to be across the whole set of services and interactions - knowing about the member or supporter and their interests across all departments, not just the contact centre and using that information to provide excellent service.
  • Route calls and enquiries to the people who are best suited to provide the best answer.
  • Give ownership of important relationships to the most appropriate department (not necessarily the contact centre).
  • It is particularly important to provide good self service.

    • The two key IT elements of this are:

  • The website needs to have good self service functionality and provide information to eliminate the need for people to phone / email. So, people should be able to update their details, make donations, pay their subscriptions, book events, etc.
  • The CRM needs to be interfaced to the website and be the repository for contact history, preferences, areas of interest and information needed for marketing.

    • Also available: ebook version

    Tags: , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | No Comments »

    Microsoft Dynamics CRM NFP Announcements

    Friday, May 28th, 2010

    There have been some interesting announcements by Microsoft on its Dynamics CRM product and additions it is making for the charity sector.

    See:

  • Microsoft announcement for US and Canada
  • NFP Techno article giving more details
  • Civil Society article confirming UK release

    • Tags: , ,
    Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | No Comments »

    Database Integrity Foils Rail Strike

    Thursday, April 1st, 2010

    Today’s high court injunction blocking the strike by RMT signallers was due to inaccuracies in the database they used for polling members. As reported in the Telegraph, there were “serious inaccuracies in the RMT ballot” with problems including votes taken from 11 signal boxes that no longer exist and 23 signal boxes left out of the vote.

    The RMT’s defence was that the union had gone to considerable lengths to ensure the accuracy of the database, but this argument was obviously not convincing to the judge, who ruled out any appeal.

    The implication is that if the errors are not corrected, then repeat ballets would also be ruled unlawful, so there may not be a rapid fix to their problems.

    This is a high profile example of the cost of data integrity problems, but similar problems cost many businesses and organisations much more than they realise. Thomas Redman, a leading expert on data quality, estimates that poor-quality data costs organisations about one-fifth of their revenue.

    To tackle these problems, organisations need to ensure they have regular management reports of data quality measures, together with business processes for making improvements to the integrity of their databases.

    Tags: ,
    Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | No Comments »

    Seminar: The Death and Rebirth of CRM

    Friday, March 26th, 2010

    Our seminar on Wednesday was very well received, with three excellent speakers bringing views and insights on CRM from very different perspectives.

    Abby Wright-Parkes of ACEVO talked about their recent experience of implementing a new database solution - an experience they’ve found very costly. She drew out a number of interesting points for NFPs: that CRM is about relationships, not data; don’t forget about relationships with people who don’t use computers; there is a need for fine tuning of communication preferences; and that it is vital to ensure the culture of the organisation is right for the new strategy and system.

    Chris Jones from Remploy gave his conclusions from their experience of large scale business change, the key theme of which is to build a flexible scalable capability for them as a business. He highlighted two examples of where CRM has been introduced. The first was a technology led programme which has resulted in a system no one uses because the project didn’t engage with the business users to put the system into the context of the business strategy and how the system needed to work operationally. The second was a system (or actually a number of separate systems) that have grown organically in the operational departments. This has resulted in successful individual systems, but which are isolated and with no ability to aggregate the data or the processes.

    Both of these really highlight the need to get the strategy right and to view the programme as a business change programme, rather than an IT project!

    The final speaker was Dominic Monkhouse of Peer1, who brought an entertaining insight into customer service [relationship management] from the commercial world of managed hosting services.  He again emphasised that it is about the culture within the organisation and potentially the need to confront and change that culture. He put forward two challenges around the theme of how can you deliver great service? The first is what can you offer. His examples here were that as UK MD, he gives his mobile number to all clients, and has only ever had four out of hours calls; and that making a very significant offer when things do go wrong has had a huge benefit to customer satisfaction, actually at marginal cost.

    His second challenge was how to drastically reduce the amount of service provided, by giving great service, particularly by eliminating errors (that result in service calls) and providing excellent facilities for customers/users to find the answers they need so easily that they don’t need to call.

    More information: white paper and presentations

    Tags: , , , , ,
    Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | No Comments »

    CRM and Website Integration

    Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

    Organisations are often faced with the dilemma of how to select their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and website CMS (Content Management System) - should they use the same supplier for both, with the promise of out of the box integration?

    This is a dilemma we find quite a lot of people having and there isn’t a single answer that suits everyone.

    The main problem is that organisations very rarely start with a “green field” - there are always legacy systems that have to be taken into account and the business case for change to be considered. This is the main reason why there isn’t one solution that suits everyone. If you have already made a considerable investment, there may not be a good commercial case for changing.

    In general, membership system / donor system / CRM (I’ll refer to them collectively as CRMs) suppliers don’t provide very good website CMSs and certainly not systems with market leading facilities. So in most cases it doesn’t make sense to use the supplier of your CRM for your CMS.

    It is generally better to use a best-of-breed CMS. There are some very good low cost and open source CMSs and a good range of companies, contractors and potential employees who can provide the implementation effort needed to build your website, content, and facilities for your forums, blogs, etc. There are a number of membership organisations and charities using the leading open source CMSs Drupal and Joomla! for example.

    The other angle on this is that integrating your CRM with your website shouldn’t be too difficult - most CRMs and all CMSs worth considering should provide web services interfaces. If your CRM doesn’t provide web services, there are also alternative methods that can be used (and if this is an area of difficulty or significant cost, maybe its time to reconsider your CRM platform).

    A more detailed question is - what data needs to be saved in the CRM and what can be kept in the website? In most cases, the answer is that data needed for managing relationships (with members and other stakeholders) should be in the CRM and other data can be in the website. So items such as name, contact details and areas of interest need to be in the CRM, and display preferences and forum postings in the website. This means that there is a relatively restricted amount of data that needs to be passed across the interface.

    Related links:

  • Ready for real-time relationships? - the implications of “social CRM”
  • Advantages of using a Content Management System - reasons for using an off-the-shelf CMS
  • Seminar on 24th March 2010: Power to Your People: The Death and Rebirth of CRM

    • Tags: , , , , , ,
    Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | 1 Comment »

    Ready for real-time relationships?

    Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

    I was at an interesting event on Wednesday, hosted by not-for-profit (NFP) supplier Iris, debating the latest technology trends (as relate to the NFP sector).

    The format was to write out your top prediction at the start. These were then all collated and debated, ending up with a vote. I was sat next to Social Media expert Steve Bridger and our contributions had a significant overlap - his was the rise of real-time computing; mine was on the increasing demands for personalisation, of content, and ultimately, of relationship.

    The common ground here is real-time relationships - that in the world of Facebook, LinkedIn and especially Twitter, charity supporters and association members expect a personal conversation that is (near) real time and not constrained to office hours.

    This type of relationship is a real challenge for NFP organisations, certainly for their software, but more importantly organisationally:

  • The best person to contribute to your side of the conversation is unlikely to be in marketing; they are much more likely to be “knowledge workers” in the research or professional development group
  • The working pattern (and HR) implications of the timing of the conversations

    • On the software side, the phrase “social CRM” has been coined in the last year or so and a number of the software vendors such as Oracle are responding. Its important to realise here though that this actually represents a huge mindset change for CRM - from “segment and conquer” to the personal conversation. This is likely to be much more manpower intensive. It is also much more about data assimilation and less about automated marketing.

    We are running a seminar related to this posting in March: Power to Your People: The Death and Rebirth of CRM, hosted by Stephen Bubb, the Chief Executive of AVECO.

    Tags: , , , ,
    Posted in Posted by Alex McLachlan | No Comments »