I have picked this up at Jim Berkowitz’s e-Journal, who focused on five out of 10 Strategies outlined in the Worcester Business Journal by John Graham, president of Graham Communications. I decided to focus on this one because it is often very problematic in CRM implementations:

3. Get serious about database management. Most companies are in total disarray when it comes to managing customer and prospect information, including those using sophisticated CRM systems.

The issues range from inaccurate, incomplete and totally missing information to a refusal by some salespeople to enter any data. Worse yet (if that’s possible), management often is duped into believing all is well, that data is being collected, updated and tested.

Strategy for initial population of contact data base, and keeping it alive and meaningful, is very often missed issue in CRM adoption and change management planning. Those who assume that users will manually populate and manage it are digging a deep grave for success of the initiative. Multimillion dollars investments were wasted because user community judged the new system “unusable” because of the inadequate data quality. It is easy to blame technology, vendors, or IT for results of poor change management.

The best practice is to automate initial load as much as possible, and do it with the least involvement of businesses community. There are various methods IT organization can facilitate this function:

1. Create logical filters to lift contacts from the corporate email servers. Create process to validate relevance of this contacts for business, and automatically upload them into new CRM contact data base preserving relationships of these contact records with employees records. It is relatively simple and inexpensive project.

2. Identify most popular applications users keep their contacts in, and provide support personnel with the tools for export/import. This approach could be short term labor intensive, but total cost/risk ratio is very positive.

3. Provide scanners, software and support for business cards and other data sources for the continuous contact population in a form of central or satellite location/service.

It is very important to formalize and publish Contact information management process or etiquette, otherwise possible conflicts may arise. This information has very short “shelf life” as people frequently change employment and/or locations and corresponding addresses, phones, emails, etc. It was estimated by Siebel Data Steward SME in 2004 ( I don’t remember his name now) that 3% of data per month is getting bad if not actively managed. There are few technological tools were developed to either ping the contact regularly for changes in their information, or monitor their information changes in social network environment and feed updates into CRM data base. I wrote about one of them before.

The subject of Customer data base in a context of B2B, as a corporate entity has another set of challenges which may be even more critical from the adoption management perspective. Complex corporate ownership structures can cause serious challenges to territory management process owners in sales operations and conflicts around account ownership, without well planned Customer Master strategy. The best practices are to leverage third party corporate information providers such as Duns & Bradstreet or First Data, to negotiate potential data conflicts, and to populate and manage the information automatically.

The quality of data in CRM system can make or break users perception of the system, company’s commitment to change, and professionalism of people who lead this change.

Paul Greenberg initiated a very interesting discussion. It is an excellent read in it’s entirety, but I will quote just a part of it here:

the contemporary empowered customer is enmeshed in some way with a network of peers, their expectations are dramatically changed. They are straightforward changes, though. They expect that they can interact with a company the same way that they interact with a friend or a peer who they can trust. That means that they expect a personal relationship to the company, not just to a person in the company, though that may be how the relationship manifests itself a larger number of times. That also means that they expect that the attributes, the characteristics of that deeply personal connection they have to a peer is part of the way that the company interacts with them. That means that trust and transparency have to permeate the company’s DNA. That means that the company has to have something distinct about them. That means that the customer is expecting the company to converse with them, not push corporate hype at them. It’s why you see contemporary marketing so geared toward buzz and word of mouth and engaging customers in conversation through use of social media like blogs, or engaging internal customers in a valued conversation through a wiki.

I also feel very passionately about the possibility of a “real” relationship between the institution and the individual, but I am less optimistic about achieving this state within the life expectancy of CRM 2.0.  There are three major obstacles in our way which imho would take much longer time to overcome:

1. Authenticity - many, if not most, institutions see the customer from the next quarter sales forecast point of view and no technology can change that. There is an opinion that the institution has no social conscience, only individuals that are part of the institution have it, so until there is a very clear, undisputable connection between authenticity and profitability it would be a long time before we see any meaningful change. I know there are exemptions and we all can name one or two institutions which have demonstratively got it, but we need much more - even now the truly successful implementations of CRM 1.0 are still only a relatively small minority relative to the number of attempts. Watch this video for experiencing an example of current institutional authenticity

2. Asymmetry - it is too common of an experience that an institution has a much louder voice than the individual. I can see great promise in current technology to change that, but the model has yet to emerge to the best of my knowledge.

3. Execution - it takes time to earn trust in a relationship, whether it is between people or institutions, time to observe a certain consistency in behavior and authenticity of intent, which I covered above. We all have experienced dealing with individuals who represented their institution in an exceptional way, but building processes and organizational changes to provide such experience consistently, across an institution, is still a huge challenge which is not a technology issue but a cultural one.

All these aside I do believe that change is the only constant and technology is a great tool to accelerate change.

One of my favorite quotes is “Happiness is expectation management”, and nobody knows better how to mismanage expectations like software marketing and sales people. However it is important to remember that it takes two to tango, and CRM purchasing decisions are often influenced, if not made, by sales and marketing executives. Add to this group some IT executives, who are famous for buying “silver bullets” every now and again, and you get very potent team of Kool-aid creators and consumers all in the same package.

It is interesting to hear the typical responses, when you ask a CRM executive sponsor about their expectations.

The top 3 answers usually are:

1. We need to improve our salespeople efficiency, so they have more time to make sales calls;

2. We need to get more leads to increase sales;

3. Our competitors “installed” CRM, so we cannot afford not to.

The only common theme in these three responses is that they predict a very high probability of failure.

Chris Bucholtz in his Inside CRM blog wrote recently:

I wonder at times whether CRM vendors have created their own fantasy lands, where customers’ CRM systems spit out leads and marketing people sit around pushing one big button that does everything for them. When you set expectations like that, there’s no way vendors can deliver.

I would like to site another quote. This one is from JP Rangaswami, the italics are mine:

Project failure and success seem to depend on saying, “Are you able to accurately articulate and honestly collect what the requirements are?” and “Are you able to express the right estimates?”…. Too many times, the collection process is weak, because the customer is not easily able to articulate [his needs] in language the people [on the project] understand. [S]oftware estimation is not a trivial exercise; it is still an art rather than a science.

[F]ailure is usually a characteristic of unwillingness to recognize change and to cover up….It’s like a salesman putting forth a forecast to management…without ever talking to the customer. Management [is] blissfully unaware of the fact that the information is false.

Ben Worthen of WSJ Business Technology Blog reported about adoption problem experienced by SureScripts.

Doctors are reluctant to change the way they’ve always done things, Rick Ratliff, SureScripts CEO, tells the Business Technology Blog. That’s why more than 26,000 pharmacies across the country — including major chains like CVS, Walgreens and Wal-Mart – are now marketing the e-prescription program directly to consumers. The hope is that enough patients will ask their doctors about the programs that doctors will be forced to use them.

This story illustrates a cost of ignoring cardinal law of holistic application design - WIITFM (What Is It For Me). Considering that the appeal of SureScripts for the pharmacies is no-brainer (shifting a burden of data entry to doctors), what would motivate the doctors to change the way they do things?

Many business applications project investments were written off because of this failure. CRM initiatives are probably the hardest hit segment. However the attempts to correct this by bullying people into adoption, as Mr. Ratcliff is quoted to suggest, will likely produce even more waste and anguish. Perhaps honest and creative review of the system would produce an improvement, which would motivate doctors to use the e-prescriptions because it save time for them - like allowing them to dictate a prescription.

“Win-Win” is a popular phrase for Sales motivational trainers, but it is probably even more important concept in “Design for Adoption”  business.

Michael Krigsman, who’s blog I subscribe to, posted an interview with the SAP CTO, Vishal Sikka who is quoted:

Lines of business know the what and IT knows the how.

Mr. Sikka does not stop there and proceeds to talk about how this relationship should be managed. However this thought is very commonly used as a dogma which I would like to challenge.

If this is true, how can we explain all the projects delivered out of time and budget constrains, all the unsatisfied business communities, and low rates of adoption we read about in Michael’s blog? Perhaps these lines of business do not tell what they need? Or perhaps IT doesn’t have the know-how to install enterprise software or to maintain infrastructure?Â

I would like to propose that the above mentioned wisdom falls into a category of truthiness and the lines of business do not know exactly what their requirements are, as well as IT often does not have the know-how and political clout to provide thought leadership required to articulate and negotiate these requirements. The what is often in a realm of notions and wishes, which are impossible to act upon. The requirements are expressed in a form of functions and features which have very remote connections to the economic reasoning for the project. The lack of this knowledge is greatly discounted and misunderstood. The "what" needs to be figured out, challenged and probed until a set of specific business requirements is distilled which communicates why it is economically necessary to invest and how the change adoption will be managed. Perhaps lines of business have to accept ownership, responsibility and leadership for success or failure of the organizational transformation initiatives rather than "outsourcing" this responsibility to IT.