Critical success factors for CRM
Ronald Swift
Excerpted from Accelerating Customer Relationships, by Ronald S. Swift, from Prentice Hall. Mr. Swift lists several critical success factors (CSFs) for both
Requires Free Membership to View
CRM and data warehousing. These are the first and last of
a series.
Planning and setting direction
Determining your strategy and defining your mission, goals, and expectations of management, employees, stockholders, partners/channels, and customers is essential. This has been the excellently stated as "vision" by some of the recent great business leaders. Driving the CSFs into allocation and resources and definition of how the organization will support the CSFs through their own goals is a process that must be accomplished. Finally, there must be executive commitment to these plans and allocations of resources. The achievements will be reported and analyzed in the final CSF: Contribution.
Contribution
The ultimate CSF is contribution to the enterprise, business unit, project, team or task.
[Contributions] include everything from financial factors, to personnel factors, to customer sales or growth factors, to channel management measurements, to margin factors, to profitability factors, to stock price factors, and even customer satisfaction factors.
Contribution measurements should be based on more than past performance for a period, more than just present performance (although this is important), and [should] use projections of opportunities (and/or customer propensities through customer histories), which culminate in intelligent allocations of resources (financial and physical).
When an organization, a team, or an individual person contributes to the enterprise, there should be public recognition of the achievements and the explanation of why it is so important to everyone. This drives other people to contribute more and more.
To learn more about Accelerating Customer Relationships, or to buy this book, click here.
Did you like this tip? Rate this tip below.
Do you have experience with this tip's topic? We'd like to hear about it. We also want to know your feelings about this tip. Click on the right to send us your comments.
This was first published in January 2001
Join the conversationComment
Share
Comments
Results
Contribute to the conversation