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Customer Relationship Management System
Need to review a customer relationship
management system for an information management strategic plan and want
some practical timesaving suggestions?
Customer relationship management (CRM)
is a complete
set of policies, standards and information technology processes aimed
at improving customer relations. 
Imagine
the water pipe to your house breaks because of cold
weather.
You call the water department and explain what happened and they
finally send someone out to fix it. Three weeks later, you get a call
asking why you used so much water during the drought. This is somewhat
annoying but could be more series and could really result in customer
dissatisfaction.
CRM is intended to
prevent “glitches” like this from happening.
There are many CRM
software products available and these are primarily designed to help:
- Track
sales leads from
first contact
thru order confirmation;
- Track
sales
team activity,
calls, notes and other things of interest; and
- Track
responses
to marketing/sales campaigns.
The
intent is to provide all customer contact information in one place so
that anyone responding to a customer call will have all the information
readily available.
Why is a CRM review
important?
The
trend today is to get a consolidated look at
information to help manage
things like customer relationships.
CRM systems hold part of the
customer information but we still need to get this information into a
usable format
that can be integrated with other customer related
information like billing and accounts receivable.
Although
CRM systems are new, they still sometimes have the “silo” effect and
they don’t necessarily talk easily
to other systems, which
need
their data.
That
means we need new information management systems to extract data from
several source applications, including CRM, integrate it
for storage
and reporting purposes and present it for business
intelligence use.
We
need to look at existing CRM systems in a similar way we look at legacy
systems to fully understand the complexity of information management.
In other words, we need to get an idea of how much data integration
work will be required to manage information stored in these customer
relationship management systems.
What is important for an
information management strategic plan?
I generally like
to gather the following information:
- The software name;
- Vendor;
- IT owner;
- Business owner;
- A brief description of what the system
does;
- System
and data base documentation;
- The perceived data quality;
- The
cost of maintaining the system; and
- The
skill levels of the production support staff
Finally,
to complete the information management strategy documentation, we need
to include the CRM package in the data mapping which maps the entities
from the entity relationship diagram to each existing system. For each
entity, ask if the
system:
- Creates the entity;
- Reads
it;
- Updates
it; or
- Deletes
it?
Summary...
- A customer relationship management system is a
vital component of an information management strategy; and
- We need to understand them so we can
assess the complexity of extracting data for business intelligence
purposes
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