The more often I travel to different companies as part of my normal 9 to 5 responsibilities, the more amazed that I am that most businesses do not understand who their customers are.  When I ask the questions “who is your customer”, most people give answers that reflect their own biases or anecdotal knowledge about [...]

Last month, I talked about how the corporate website strategy was an essential element of CRM implementation because it is a major touch point of interaction between a company and its customers.  Today, I came across a post that triggered another important component to a company’s CRM implementation; that of the company IVR.
As CRM moves [...]

The sales process from lead generation to opportunity management has always been a difficult one to enforce, as sales reps are not people who tend to be process-oriented.  Thus, many reps do not bother to do more with a CRM system than to use it as a digital Rolodex – schedule activities, write notes about [...]

I cannot stress enough the importance of detailed, thorough, and complete documentation when it comes to CRM implementation projects (or any project, for that matter).  A project I was recently involved with on a periphery basis went through a significant amount of pain because of the disconnect between sales and the implementation team in regards [...]

Salesforce.com has recently put an emphasis on a new paradigm, knowledge as a service, which relies heavily on social CRM, and has positioned its corporate vision towards that end.  Yet, as has become commonplace focus is on brand-related solutions that are fit for the enterprise, but does nothing to touch on sCRM for the SMB [...]

One of the most common pitfalls in any CRM implementation is poor change management.  While true of any software implementation, the impact of poor change management on CRM (or ERP for that matter) is high due to the pervasiveness and importance of CRM in the organization.
Earlier in my career, I learned the relative [...]

Off shoring has been a trend in Customer Service call centers for the past decade, providing companies with low-cost call center solutions, yet with mixed results when it comes to customer service. Offshore operations suffer from communication difficulties and cultural differences, making complex requests difficult to resolve without unneeded customer aggravation. In recent [...]

Ian Hendry, CEO of WeCanDo.biz, recently had a post over at ZDNet regarding Social CRM for small businesses.  Hendry’s thesis is that most of the discussions surrounding SCRM involve distributed brand management.  While important for medium and small sized businesses, Hendry argues, the strategy has the danger of leaving small businesses behind.  Hendry argues that [...]

It happened to me the other day, and it’s happened many times before.  I’m in a needs analysis meeting with a new customer, reviewing their processes and working to implement a CRM strategy that makes sense for their business.  When discussing process with a project management group, I came across the fact that there was [...]

All too often, when doing a CRM implementation, my customers will request dozens and dozens of email notifications from the system, for every event from a new lead being assigned to a scheduled activity being due, to a note being updated on an account.  I once had a sales manager request an email notification every [...]

Late last week, I called into a customer service department that had your standard “please hold” IVR.  It had no options telling me how long the queue was, and, as typical, had the most generic and annoying hold music.  After about 20 minutes, I gave up, and hung up the phone in disgust.  It is [...]

It is no secret that direct marketing plays an important role in most companies’ marketing strategy.  Yet at the same, time, most forms of direct marketing are an annoyance to customers, so much so that laws have been passed heavily regulating the means of direct marketing via electronic channels (email, fax, and voice;  SMS can’t [...]

Customer satisfaction surveys are one of the primary means of CSR analytics for Customer Service departments.  Yet the response rate for these surveys is typically low.  Additionally, a person who had a problem with customer service is far more likely to respond to a survey than someone who did not.  Both of these facts skew [...]

I was just on a company’s web site, looking at a product that I was interested in trying out.  The site had a button “Call Me Now” which allowed the user to fill out the typical contact form, and would have a phone call placed immediately thereafter.  Sure enough, within seconds, my desk phone rang, [...]

One of the larger causes of CRM implementation failures in small businesses is over-engineering.  Small businesses have a need to be agile and flexible, and many a CRM implementation tries to put too many restrictions and enact too rigid a process to make the tool useful for a small business.
Several years ago, I was involved [...]