Reaching Your Goals With Effective Business Intelligence CRM
How to measure the success of your Business Intelligence CRM strategy?
Effective Business intelligence CRM is a topic that I’ve only gotten involved with in the past few years. Before that, the middle market companies I’ve worked with couldn’t afford the entry price. Expensive software with hefty consulting engagements for building data warehouses and business management System metrics simply made it impossible.

Tactical Business Process Management Metrics

I just made that term up. I throw anything that supports measurements to things like the sales Business process management tactical. Just because someone names a methodology Strategic Selling doesn’t make it strategic. Keep in mind that the sales organization derives it’s initiatives from a corporate vision. Let’s hope it’s customer centric!

I find some of the “dashboards” out there to be useless and extremely confusing. They either look like a vintage sports car, or there are so many low level “MBO” or “KPI’s” on them that there no better than raw data. Let’s be serious. Solutions for effectively monitoring business intelligence CRM should provide information, not raw data. Why would you want to think about what you’re looking at? Wouldn’t it be better to know either everything’s OK, or something is wrong with out having to process data in your head?

Strategic Business Management Metrics

I like making up headlines like that. Since I consider Business Intelligence CRM to be a strategic, customer-centric way of doing business, you should have decided up front what was going to improve and how you were going to measure it. To do this you’ll need a means of presenting the results. You might be trying to…

1. Incrementally increase revenue – your customer focused realignment could lead to the attraction of new customers at an increased rate. Referrals are great that way. If this is part of your plan, then plan to measure this increase relative to the implementation of your Business Intelligence CRM strategy.

2. Cost Reduction – Reducing the friction in your business by re-working your Business Process Management to be customer-centric will allow you to reduce your staff and increase your yield. Your plan should identify where this will occur and how you will gain from them. You cannot justify the investment if you can’t measure them.

3. Improve profitability – whether by becoming more efficient, identifying a more profitable product and service mix, or by extending the average customer lifecycle, you should know what to expect in advance and measure it against your goals. Effective business intelligence CRM tools are a great help, but a spreadsheet could do it too.

4. Retrieve lost opportunity costs – what have you been doing all these years? Losing customers you should have kept. Losing high quality employees that refused to put up with “that’s the way we’ve always done it”. Turnover costs you money because it’s always more expensive to acquire than it is to keep.

Effective business intelligence CRM isn’t about the glitzy tool. It’s about your plan and the measures you’ve set for determining your success. Don’t accept what comes out of the box. Be prepared to challenge them with your requirements.
After all, they don’t know your business management strategy, so they can’t possibly have predicted the best set of measures for your business.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Related Posts