Diary of a CRM Implementation

Transcription

1 Diary of a CRM Implementation Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

2 Contents Introduction... 3 The Project Plan... 3 Requirements Definition... 4 Vendor Selection... 5 System Design... 6 Data Preparation and Cleansing... 6 Development... 7 Testing... 7 Training... 8 Go Live Activities... 9 CRM Implementation Problem Solving References Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

3 Introduction A CRM implementation project is a major undertaking that impacts a surprising number of different areas of the business, many of which have their own goals to progress that can sometimes be hard to tie into the overall whole. Managing a CRM project is easier if you are aware of the potential benefits and also pitfalls that can occur along the way. By reviewing a CRM implementation diary based on one organization s experience it is possible to review the challenges that can occur, with an aim of avoiding these. Following project manager Peter Harris, at his organization it is possible to observe how potential issues can be addressed and benefits of CRM realized. The Project Plan Before getting underway with the CRM project, Peter Harris prepared a project plan. It was similar to the plan shown below. Peter wanted to identify the teams and major milestones that would have to be achieved to get the project up and running within the time frame and to the defined budget, or at least as closely as possible. Peter identified eight major activities that would need to be undertaken. This report follows Peter s diary of obstacles encountered and successes achieved along the way. Figure: CRM Project Plan (Source: Boardman, 2010) Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

4 Requirements Definition January 3 Today has been a challenge. It was the first day back from the holidays and I spent the day with the Executive Team in the boardroom. Over the holidays the CEO decided that this year is the one that we implement CRM. Today we were supposed to outline the requirements so that we can take them to a vendor. The Sales Director and Marketing Director however, could not see eye to eye, and the Finance Director thinks it is all a waste of money. Instead of focusing on the requirements they were blaming one another about whose fault it was that targets were not met last year. Finally, by the end of the day we were able to agree a framework for developing a comprehensive requirements document. After today s time-wasting we ve agreed to meet separately by function to define the requirements. I ve set up weekly meetings with sales, marketing and customer services. I hope things go better next week. Getting the all of the stakeholders engaged is critical. February 17 Well, we re still chugging through the requirements definition. It s been an uphill battle because the Finance Director is against the project so will not define a clear budget. His team is also being extremely difficult. On the plus side, I met with the Customer Service Representatives and that was excellent for getting into the nitty gritty of what the system needs to do for them. I told them what we are hoping to achieve and they were pretty excited. I think they are just glad to be included in the process. Getting all of the stakeholders engaged in a CRM project is critical. March 23 Finally, the requirements document is finished. It captures everything. The Finance director also signed off on the budget today! Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

5 Vendor Selection April 1 This past week I ve been meeting with possible vendors outlining our requirements. There is one system that will be excellent for the CSRs, but I don t think they ll be able to come in on budget. We might not be able to give the CSRs everything we hoped to. Also, today the CEO decided that we need to include Social CRM in the requirements. That meant I had to update the requirements document and resend it to the vendors that I d already met with. A couple of them aren t offering Social CRM, so it seems like I wasted a bit of time there. May 5 Today I presented the CRM shortlist of vendors to the key stakeholders: System 1 meets all the requirements but is $15,000 over budget System 2 meets 90% of the requirements but has no Social CRM and is $1,000 over budget System 3 meets 80% of the requirements, but can t offer the reporting that we wanted. It does come in on budget and is scalable. Compromise is often needed to make sure that most of the requirements of CRM are met. As you may have already guessed this list kept no one happy, but these were the best choices on the table. However, a compromise is often needed to make sure that most of the requirements of the CRM are met, so we worked towards that. In the end everyone compromised on System 3, but the Marketing Director was unhappy about the situation with the reporting. Still, you can t have everything. The Finance Director was delighted with the price, so he s back on board with the project. Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

6 System Design June 25 Back from my summer vacation and the system design is well underway. It should be finished by the planned date. One problem is that while I was away, the Marketing Director went to the vendor and priced up them developing the reporting that we need. The Finance Director got wind of it and now only she or I are authorized to approve changes with the vendor. Anyway, the vendor did a demo today, and I took the Customer Services Manager along to see. She was delighted, and they re really excited to start working with it. She says it will save them a lot of time, compared with now, and she was happy with the way that processes can be aligned in the system to avoid human error. Data Preparation and Cleansing August 15 This was the worst day on the project so far. For weeks now the IT team has been trying to get the current marketing system data into a format that will work with the new system. The marketing team uses a legacy system. The IT team said that it would all work OK, but it has not. I should have checked the details properly with them. Linking legacy systems with new systems can be quite a challenge and this has been no 47 percent of CRM implementations fail. exception. The data is a mess and full of duplicates. The marketing system is so old and was built by a guy that is no longer working here. It seems that no one really understands how it works or can get the data to be properly recognized. We should have asked this question at the start. I m kicking myself. The project is going to be set back a month and we have to bring in five temps at a cost to the project to do the work manually. This is not a happy day in our CRM implementation. I ve heard that 47% of CRM implementations fail. I don t want this to be one of them! Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

7 Development August 30 It has been a difficult few weeks dealing with the data preparation and cleansing but today our development milestone was met. Now that we re running out of time because of the extended time that we re taking on the data cleanse, the testing will have to run concurrently with the end stages of the development. I raised the issues of new development introducing new bugs while testers are testing the system, but I was ignored. Still, the development work went well and the vendor was able to pull a bit of time back there. Integrating legacy systems with new systems can be an IT challenge. One problem is that the Marketing Director is still pushing for the reports that were scratched off the requirements early on. I have realized that despite saying no, this particular stakeholder is not going to back down. We met today and managed to compromise on the development of three of his desired five reports. He seems somewhat happier, but I am not sure that is the end of it. Testing September 9 Testing began in earnest this week. Naturally it is all a big mess because as the system is still being developed, the testers are not getting to test stable versions. That means that they look at a version of the system and report problems, only to find that the next version has even more problems. I wish I had been firmer about no testing until after the development was over. The process flows that seemed fine earlier in the week are now not working again, and it has been a very frustrating way of working. I think the project is now about a month delayed overall. We were looking to launch at the end of October, Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

8 and a month puts us back to the end of November. We can t launch at the end of November though because it would be foolish to launch this new system right before the peak shopping day of the year, Black Friday. Training October 30 As expected the testing and development phase went back and forward for weeks until I finally managed to get the CEO to listen to me that we would have to complete the development work first. There were suggestions that training could happen concurrently to testing as well, but I managed to explain that this would mean that users would be trained on an unstable version of the system and eventually everyone listened to me. Of course we are still not going to be able to launch until January but at least we ll be ready and prepared. It also gives the vendor a chance to get the documentation for the system completed. Their main process analyst left in the middle of the project. That should not have been our problem but it would have had a serious impact had we been running on time. I had some trouble getting dates out of the Marketing Director and his team for the training. Since the whole problem with the marketing reports they have all been really reluctant to get involved or put any energy into the process. They were supposed to be trained today, five of them, but only two showed up, and both were very sullen. I am worried about their levels of engagement with this project. Oversights in the requirements gathering stage can lead to delays later. Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

9 November 4 Today in training I realized that there had been a major oversight in the requirements phase, as it turns out the data does not feed into the system for the CSRs in quite the way that it should. I m not sure why it was not spotted in testing but one of the problems is that the customer s date of birth is transposed, day before month. That means that CSRs may make errors in verifying customers. It seems like a small thing, but according to the Customer Services Manager it is a showstopper. I hope it can be fixed easily. I have a meeting with the vendor tomorrow. Luckily the CSR team that I ve been working with has been really helpful with finding these types of issues, and I put that down to involving them in the requirements building stage of the process. I often find that collaboration during the requirements phase leads to support later. November 5 As it turns out it is lucky that we did not plan to go live with the system in November, as the data problem is going to take a month to fix. The CEO is seething. At least training has been able to continue, and all CSRs should be trained within the next ten days. Go Live Activities December 30 Collaboration at the requirements phase can lead to support later on in the project. As we look ahead to a new year, I wonder how on earth this project took so long to get completed. I had read that an implementation can be completed within three months, but with all the problems we had along the way, I m glad that we allowed a lot of time for this project. Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

10 We re still facing some issues though. Today I was in with the Marketing team getting the system installed on their computers and no one that was there knew anything about it. In fact, one woman said, Oh, that? That s still happening? Our director told us it was a waste of time Everyone has put so much work into getting this system launched, and I was disappointed to hear that. It made me wonder why I d put so much energy into it. I m worried that the business won t fully realize the benefits of the system because the Marketing Director is obviously against the decisions that were made, even though he agreed it was fine when he got his three reports. Apparently the problem is still underlying with him and his team. I told the CEO but he doesn t care. He s moved onto a new idea, Customer Experience Management. We should have seen that coming when we scoped the requirements of this project. January 2 Today was the big launch day and remarkably it all seemed to go off without a hitch. The Sales and Customer Services teams are delighted with the depth of data that they have and have big plans for the future. In my final report I raised the problem of lack of engagement in some teams, but I m pretty sure it won t even get read. The business won t get the return on investment they were hoping for without dealing with it, but there s not much more I can do about it. Onto the next project for me! CRM Implementation Problem Solving Reviewing the diary of Peter Harris it is possible to see that many issues can occur during a CRM implementation. A lot of these can be mitigated to some degree through paying attention to critical activities along the way. These are highlighted in the table below. Issue Approach Senior manager dissent Everyone needs to be on board with the CRM implementation at the outset. If senior managers are not in agreement they may actively obstruct the process, but importantly their team will follow their lead. CRM implementations that meet their goals have a united Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

11 management team that agree fundamentally on the strategy and vision for the CRM. They do not let their own egos get in the way of a smooth implementation. Legacy systems Scoping requirements Stakeholder management Plan sufficient time Understand vendor risks It can be difficult to get legacy systems to interface with newly introduced systems, especially if the latter were built several years ago. Due diligence at the outset to understand the likely problems associated with legacy systems can save time later. Don t just automatically assume that there will be a way to get systems to work together, as there may be, but it may be difficult to implement and add weeks to a project time frame. Getting the requirements right at the outset is paramount. Try to think ahead a bit when doing so. Today s quirky new idea for CRM might be tomorrow s next big thing. Do your research and make sure you build a system that will meet your requirements in the medium term, not just the short term. During the process of a CRM implementation, the project manager should work to keep the stakeholders happy. At a minimum that will include the managers and team members representing the Sales, Marketing and Customer Services teams that will interact with the system, as well as the business owner in this example, the CEO. Large CRM implementations like the one described in this diary can take a long time to do properly. Trying to save time by running conflicting tasks in parallel will lead to problems with some of the tasks being completed effectively. Building contingency into the project plan is essential. You may find that vendors will tell you what you want to hear so that they can sell you their system. Before committing, make sure that your vendor can really do what they say they can. Understand any risks and mitigation that is being taken on their side, otherwise unforeseen delays to the project can creep in that you did not anticipate. Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products

12 References Anderson, J. (2013) 2013 Top CRM Buyer Trends, Info Trust, accessed 11/27/13: Boardman, R. (2010) How long does a CRM project really take? The CRM Consultant, accessed 12/11/13: Krigsman, M. (2009) CRM failure rates: , ZdNet, accessed 11/25/13: Murphy, E. (2013) Enterprises to show CRM the money, CRM Buyer, accessed 11/27/13: Rose Asp, (2013) Cloud CRM trends around the world, accessed 11/25/13: Rothman, D. (2013) Choosing a CRM Solution? 5 Important Questions to Ask Yourself, Bluewolf, accessed 11/25/13: Russell, L. (2013) 3 Crucial Business Trends to Plan for in 2014, Customer Think, accessed 11/26/13: Woods, D. (2013) Why your CRM Implementation is Quietly Failing, Forbes, accessed 11/27/13: Diary of CRM Implementation Compare Business Products