Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

Hi Rickir

Getting a User Buy-In is one of the most challenging aspects of Implementing a CRM system, especially the high end ones like SAP which are capable of doing almost anything, most of which any single company won’t need! The most successful ideas, from my experience are those which reward the users in the quality of the job they do and, if appropriate, the bonus they earn.

Prizes are a good idea for a big launch and given the costs of a SAP system, the previous suggestions will not even dent the project budget, but they must be seen to be a short term measure to reward people during the stressful time of real life testing. Getting people to compete on a wall board is an interesting idea but you should be careful that you reward quality and not volume.

No CRM system is static and feedback from live users is vital to its continuing development but I feel very strongly that the inclusion of users should start now if the system is to go live in July. The pre launch period should consist of extensive consultations concerning your business practices, methods and processes. Unfortunately this usually both starts and stops with consulting the management who will tell you what they think is going on, rather than what is actually going on.

Ask the people who carry out the tasks what they actually do when they are facing the customer. What activities do they generate for themselves, the back office and for management?

Then ask the CRM implementation team how these will be configured on a SAP screen, how the process cuts down the manual work needed and how it improves the lot of the people who do the work.

Then ask if it could be done better. Examine the implications all the way through to the back office and through to the management reporting you need to run your company. Examine how this will make future tasks on the same account more efficient or easier to carry out. See if the implementation of the SAP system will allow additional opportunities to be seized on by using the data collected in a more effective manner.

To do this, your implementation team will need to spend a considerable amount of time with the front-end team and their input needs to be recognised publicly. If you hand a group of users a powerful piece of software which imposes a pile of additional responsibilities and workload they will hate it and it will never gain acceptance.

One of the worst examples I have encountered turned a simple telephone enquiry system based on paper into a CRM screen which involved filling in about 130 separate fields, 12 of which related to the enquiry they used to process, the rest to some grandiose vision the CRM developer had for the “Other Things” that the system might do. No one used it and the system fell into disuse over 2 years.

Same goes for reporting. If sales staff don’t have to compile reports, they are unlikely to want to fill in data on-screen so that their manger has an easier time of it by not having to sift though their data and compile a spreadsheet! If that is the case at the moment, the task is a tough one. If currently they have to tot up their achievements every day / week / month it’s a lot easier as the CRM package can relieve them of this vital but time consuming task.

Getting them to add to their work burden to ease someone else’s is a lot harder, but if the system can be shown to improve their existing workload, improve the efficiency of the tasks they have to do and it's use will contribute to their careers and bonus’s they will accept additional challenges.

If a CRM system simply delivers the same results but faster than the previous way of working but with a greater data input requirement from the users, it will be a poor implementation and will usually fail.


Hope that some bits of this are of use


Steve

Hello

Choose the people who are more adverse to the changes, and try to involve them in different activities related to CRM launch, give them responsibilities in order to satisfy their need to be heard and receive recognition.

It is very important for people to understand the benefits of changes. ¿What are my benefits? Then communicate, communicate and communicate, use different ways to do it, like big shows, theatre, comedies, parties,...

Remember that the Customer is the center of CRM strategies, and the employees are the first customers. The consider the like customers, include them in customers activities, advertising, gifts, launch, promotional merchandising,...

Bye,

Juan Carlos