Which in turn...

As someone very sagely noted in a meeting last week - while the initial stages of a CRM implementation pick off the low hanging fruit, the real benefits accumulate over time. To illustrate the point I’ll tell a rambling and probably not very grammatical tale of one of our older clients:

Our initial involvement was to help them implement a CRM system that delivered better customer service metrics, which in turn the client used to improve the quality of support they were offering. However the system also started to provide better insight into the issues that customers were reporting, which in turn led to a series of product improvements, which improved product reliability, further enhanced customer service, but also reduced the number of customer support calls, which alongside productivity improvements meant, over time, that customer service reps weren’t replaced when they left, and staff costs for the unit dropped 30%. Customer service continued to improve despite the reduction in numbers, and became a key point of differentiation in respect to their competitors, which in turn facilitated a series of large contract wins, which in turn put a key competitor – who at one stage had threatened to engulf them - into full retreat, and with this as less of a distraction, and with the increases in revenue and reduced costs to fund the new initiatives the client was able to attack and break into two substantial new markets, which in turn…

…and hopefully you get the picture, so in essence the system, over a period of three years, provided the infrastructure for a fundamental transformation of the business, with one benefit spawning another to create a virtuous circle of improvement over time.

Recognition that the real pay back from CRM takes time is an important insight. Too many CRM implementations are geared around the concept of a one off CRM project rather than recognition of a long term CRM programme, which means the low hanging fruit might get picked but the bigger benefits are never harvested.