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Oprius is an interesting player in the CRM space because it goes against the current “conventional wisdom”. At a time when everybody is trying to establish as wide a footprint as they can possibly muster, Oprius focuses exclusively on Contact Management functionality, which is at the heart of the sales process.
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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.
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