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Cram for CRM Effectiveness. Train employees at all customer touchpoints to get the most from your software
Written by Kelly Shermach, May 2006
As customer relationship management (CRM) has matured through infancy and a tempestuous childhood, it has reached a usefulness that has pushed it beyond sales, marketing, and service functions. Nationwide Building Society, a U.K. financial services company, wanted to deliver more sensitive, satisfying experiences to its customers through the channels they prefer, and hoped to do this via CRM. But first, Nationwide set up a critical training regimen.
Nationwide engaged its IT employees, senior executives, frontline bank tellers, and insurance agents in its new CRM training program. Everyone in the organization (some 12,000 employees) viewed a video and received training that taught them how to enter data into the CRM solution and how to sell.
Nationwide's investment in the CRM process—the company uses a package developed by Portrait Software, headquartered outside London—has saved it nearly $435,000 in marketing annually since implementation, and lifted cross-sell and upsell activity 10 times more than traditional means had achieved.
The CRM system is used by 4,500 Nationwide employees to support more than 25,000 interactions per day. Because as many as 10,000 personalized sales offers are made daily using the CRM, understanding the technology and interface is critical.
But since each customer contact is a potential sales or service opportunity, CRM-enhanced organizations may experience "complete disaster" if they don't train all users on the system, says Mark Smith, Boston-based executive vice president of Portrait Software. "Early adopters used CRM for simple cost efficiencies and doing the basics right," Smith says. "With this under their belts, they are now moving to using the data for more strategic things, such as changing their business models or operating process to better match their customers' processes." Unless there's employee education and buy-in, these goals just won't work.
In addition, organizations looking to optimize business processes are importing into their CRM packages information from other applications, such as sales force automation, call-center programs, customer service automation, contact management, and business intelligence analytics, says Robert Blumstein, research director of CRM analytics and marketing applications for IDC, a technology research firm based in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Blumstein says that employees recognize the value of this integration, in particular if it features ease of use, ease of access, and a logical user interface. However, CRM training must not be a form of punishment. "People don't want a system that requires them to input data for the following fifty-seven fields, and [think] maybe, sometime in the future, they'll use it," Blumstein says. "CRM is not about software. It is about the process behind it."
