10 days to CRM successKey strategies for securing executive buy-in, analyzing business processes and promoting user adoption

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CRM isn’t just software — it’s a complete set of business processes that connects you and your customers throughout sales, marketing, service and beyond. CRM can make or break customer experiences, such as:

• Service consistency through visibility into customer interactions

• Response times and order accuracy

• Centralized customer feedback collection to identify trends and recognize opportunities to improve customer service

Yet more than 50 percent of CRM implementations fail. While some companies achieve double-digit percentage growth in revenue, improved productivity and increased customer satisfaction from new CRM projects, most don’t.

CRM implementations that work

Over the years, we have seen what it takes for a company to succeed with CRM. It’s not a secret or a complicated methodology, but it’s critical to success.

One key is preparation: upfront planning and a clear understanding of what the outcomes should look like. Through our experiences in working with clients that are realizing the full potential of CRM, we have identified key steps to help you prepare for success.

10 days to CRM successBecause it manages your company’s interactions with current and future customers, implementing customer relationship management (CRM) software can be one of the most valuable initiatives your business will undertake.

Table of contents

Day 1: Establish vision and objectives 3

Day 2: Assemble the team 4

Day 3: Activate the team 4

Day 4: Define the experience 5

Day 5: Assess business processes 6

Day 6: Learn the canvas 7

Day 7: Determine solution requirements 7

Day 8: Establish communication strategy 8

Day 9: Create a risk management plan 9

Day 10: Serve users 10

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Day 1

Establish vision and objectives

Senior leadership should define the CRM vision, address the need for change, identify problems to be fixed and articulate desired results. The vision is the intersection of business drivers and strategic objectives that can collectively support better customer experiences.

Measure for success

Once the vision is established — which may be to scale the business, to simplify customer interactions or to improve customer experience — you can begin to define the measurements of success.

To understand whether you are making progress toward achieving the strategic vision, you need clearly defined measurements. Using the SMART guidelines, define goals that are:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Results-focused

• Time-bound

Prepare for change

The implementation of a CRM system should not be considered a single event. The market can change. Clients can change. Establish how you will revisit your CRM strategy and measurements of success after the initial project is complete.

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Day 2

Assemble the team

Successful CRM implementations start with a strong project team that understands your business. Members must be empowered to make decisions, improve existing business processes and change the status quo.

The roles and size of the CRM project team will vary based on the scope of the implementation, the number of users and the amount of change introduced. Executive buy-in is a must, and it’s critical that everyone in the organization be aware a commitment to the project comes from the top. An executive sponsor should act as the liaison between the project team and executive-level stakeholders. Monitoring the project, the executive sponsor should provide perspective to ensure that the project stays focused on desired business outcomes, resolve escalations when necessary and champion initiatives to leaders across the organization.

To complete the team, you must define the roles and identify the best person for each job. Clearly define responsibilities and expectations for each team member. Identify who will be contributing and who needs only to stay informed. Include subject matter experts from all affected areas of the organization for balanced representation on the team. You’ll get better buy-in for process changes if all departments feel they are engaged in the journey. Assign responsibility for achieving desired business outcomes, such as improving the customer experience, sales process and/or pipeline management and accuracy.

Day 3

Activate the team

Once the team has been identified, you should take several steps to ensure that everyone is on the same page. The project will include members from different business units or departments who need to work together for the good of the project and its success. Prepare the team to work objectively and collaboratively.

Clarify priorities

Fully educate the team so they have a clear understanding of your overall business objectives. During requirements workshops, the team will be looking at current processes to establish which ones are working well and which are not. The project team members need to understand that they can highlight new business requirements or process changes needed for their respective areas. When recruiting team members, identify who will fill in for their regular work during the time they are committed to the CRM initiative. While smaller projects might not be a problem, larger implementations may take team members away from their day job for quite some time — it can be a full-time commitment.

Team members will be better able to focus on the project if they are not worried about deliverables they have to complete when they return to their regular roles. Identify and define guiding principles for team interaction and fulfillment of project objectives.

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Guiding principles

Establish values and standards of practice for the project team. For example:

• We will be honest with each other

• We will show respect when suggesting new ideas

• We will take risks

• We will be vulnerable

• We will hold each other accountable

• We will stay close to the functionality of the software, even if it requires a change to our business processes

Day 4

Define the experience

To be successful, the CRM project team will need to examine experiences from two perspectives — the user of the CRM system and the customers your business serves. They will need to understand the current experience and define the desired experience for both groups.

For users, the team needs to evaluate how they are working today and identify any hurdles they are experiencing.

For customers, you need to understand their actual experience across channels — self-service, email, telephone and in-person. Do customers have to repeat their needs every time they call and speak with a different sales or service representative?

Journey maps

Journey mapping is an important tool to help align your business processes with the goals of your clients. Through journey mapping, you identify moments of truth (MOTs), which are when users form or change their opinion about the new system, or when clients form or change their opinion about your company based on their experience with your team members, systems and processes. A user’s MOT may happen while answering client questions during inbound calls; the MOT is affected by the user’s ability to easily access the needed information in a timely manner to answer the questions. A client’s MOT might be when he or she engages with the customer service department; the MOT is affected positively or negatively by how long it takes to speak with an agent and whether the issue is resolved without the client being transferred. The project team should use MOT findings to define project priorities for both business process improvement and business requirements for the system.

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Day 5

Assess business processes

Taking the time to assess business processes that will be supported by the new CRM system sets the stage for project success. Conduct interviews and workshops with those who are currently doing the work to develop use cases. Use cases list the steps required to complete a business process and the desired outcomes.

Use cases are an effective and widely used technique to define system requirements and again during testing to confirm that the system meets the identified needs. Taking this approach helps the team focus on the user goals of each aspect of the CRM implementation, rather than emphasizing system functionality.

Focus on customer experience

It’s important to recognize that assessing and changing business processes are challenging for most businesses. Recommending changes to the way it has always been done requires objective and creative problem solving.

As the team works through business processes for each department, pay special attention to the points of interdepartmental coordination. Look for processes where handoffs have caused friction in the past. Define how the process would flow best from the client’s perspective. In the end, customer experience must be the overall priority. Processes, employee behaviors and CRM all need to be aligned around delivering the desired customer experience.

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Day 6

Learn the canvas

To help your CRM project team make the best decisions, they should have the opportunity to become familiar with CRM themselves. They need to learn the canvas that will bring their business processes to life.

Because your company has likely been using various legacy systems, the project team will need demos and basic CRM training. In any software implementation, it is important to become familiar with the software and its capabilities.

Build project team confidence

With a clear understanding of basic CRM functionality, project members will be better equipped to visualize how business processes may be handled in the new system.

Your project team will benefit from seeing how the CRM system can be configured to incorporate company-specific terminology, and how it will integrate with other systems. By answering questions and alleviating concerns about the way the system could function, you will build confidence in your project team — confidence they will need to evangelize the solution to other people in their departments.

Day 7

Determine solution requirements

Solution requirements describe the significant functions and processes your CRM system is intended to support. With current information and the input of all the project team members, you should revisit the initial solution requirements to ensure that they still align with your current vision and objectives. The team may determine that some of the deliverables have changed from what was expected during the sales process. Many CRM projects take the “kitchen sink” approach. You can set up fields to capture every conceivable fact about clients, but the time it would take users to enter all that data is unrealistic and directly affects user experience and adoption. The team should review the requirements, identifying the information that is critical to meet business objectives.

The next reality check should include evaluating the resources you currently have available. By prioritizing requirements, you can take a phased approach to the implementation based on realistic availability of resources and a focus on functionality that promotes adoption. Successful initiatives start with the essential features first and then a plan for continuous improvement over time.

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Day 8

Establish a communication strategy

A CRM implementation will affect many departments and people within the organization. Since only a small group of individuals (the CRM project team) is directly involved in the planning and implementation work, the success of the project can hinge on a good communication strategy.

When outlining your strategy, identify who is responsible for communicating to departments across the organization, clients, partners and vendors. Clearly define what needs to be communicated and when before choosing the right vehicle. Determine who should receive communications, including:

• Future users of the system

• Anyone directly affected by the initiative

• Project stakeholders — both internal and external to the organization

Keep communications simple

The goal is to inform, as well as to ease fear of change. Help employees buy into upcoming changes by providing training and ongoing system support. Timing and targeting of content are key. Plan a timetable for regular communication to keep everyone in the loop without overwhelming or boring them. To add some fun to your communications, consider branding the solution. Create a logo design contest. Use shared countdowns to major milestones in the project — anything to keep your stakeholders and future users engaged.

To ensure that your users and organization are ready for change, evaluate:

• How have similar implementations gone previously?

• Are any business or IT areas experiencing adverse effects from a recent change?

• How aligned is your project leadership?

Once you’ve assessed your readiness, you can create a plan to manage organizational change and potential risks.

Day 9

Create a risk management plan

While maintaining a risk management plan is no guarantee that you will avoid all possible project pitfalls, it’s an important step to prepare for potential challenges. Risk planning will help your project team constructively identify and plan proactive steps to navigate potential issues that may surface during the implementation. Competing projects can drain time and resources. If you are an organization of 600 people and you have 100 projects happening at any given time — that’s 100 projects not just competing for mindshare of your team, but also driving additional change in the organization.

Other risk factors to think about include:

• Misaligned project assumptions and different expectations among stakeholders

• Technology — do you have what you need or do you need to refresh your infrastructure? Is cloud the right option?

• Missing leadership support or infrequent or inactive executive sponsorship

• Failure to backfill existing schedules/workloads for key project team members

• User adoption

• Fear of change — what are your plans if your sales force refuses to use the new system?

To prepare for the biggest risk in a CRM implementation — lack of user adoption — make sure your team is ready for change and understands the strategic benefits to your organization, your clients and each user group before you get started. User adoption is usually the trickiest and most time-intensive step during a CRM implementation, and should be an important aspect of your organizational change management plan to promote early realization of benefits.

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Day 10

Serve your users

It is important to get people excited and to encourage adoption. You might want to create a portal or a “collaboration environment” where users can learn, communicate, create a community and become super users. A visual scorecard that tracks progress and successes can foster friendly competition and allow each person to see how well he or she is doing in comparison to colleagues. The more users engage with the system and see firsthand the data they have at their fingertips, the more they will want to use the system and abandon homegrown Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.

Plan for role and job impact

Improving business processes means changing the way people do their work. You may be automating manual processes, and the people who performed those tasks will be concerned about job security. They need to know they are valued and what they will be doing in the future. Communication is important to everyone involved.

Close the feedback loop

As you go live, encourage user feedback and act on it quickly. Make sure you close the loop on feedback. Collect customer feedback; customers may not need to know you’ve implemented a new system, but their feedback could provide insight into how to improve your system.

The goal of the implementation is not to make your CRM system a perfect solution on day one — rather, it provides a strong foundation to develop and improve over time. Ongoing attention is important for user adoption, continuous process improvement and to achieve long-term goals and business objectives. Work toward continuous improvement with an ongoing training program that will help users take the system to new levels. Review your vision, business goals and objectives quarterly. Ongoing attention allows you to capture more value from your CRM investment, rather than letting the system stagnate in the midst of changing market conditions, customer needs and process improvements.

Implement with confidence

At DXC Eclipse, we know the value of improving the lives of your clients and equipping your team to deliver the ultimate customer experience. Our approach is all-encompassing — from asking the tough questions to strategizing, designing and implementing the right solution, all while providing knowledgeable support and guidance to ensure that your users and stakeholders derive the maximum benefit from your CRM investment.

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We’ve implemented CRM solutions for thousands of users across many industries. Whether deploying in the cloud, on-premises or integrating with your existing business applications, our team understands the importance of balancing innovation with organizational impact. Our goal is to craft solutions that provide genuine performance improvements and enhanced visibility into your relationships. Our end-to-end approach starts on day one with a focus on your ongoing journey, not just the project. To set you up for long-term success, we include additional benefits far beyond the technology, such as:

• Business Transformation and Organizational Change: Reinforces project and business outcomes through change leadership, strategies for communication and involvement, organization and job design, process training, benefits realization and more.

• Data and Technology Strategy: Includes strategy for master data management (MDM) and roadmaps to sequence initiatives that may include CRM, business intelligence and analytics, configurators, customer/vendor portals, and integration with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

• Customer Experience Improvement: Develops strategies for improving both customer and user experiences, including aligning sales processes with the buyer journey, developing multichannel service strategies, and using touchpoints to improve support and delivery of the desired experience.

• Business Process Improvement: Identifies, prioritizes and maps areas for improvements across marketing, sales, service, supply chain, operations and finance.

Why DXC Eclipse?

DXC Eclipse, a practice within DXC Technology, helps enterprise and mid-market companies accelerate digital transformation, solve business challenges and deliver intelligent solutions that make a difference for clients, employees and partners. We believe in delivering expertise, project transparency and excellent customer service in every engagement.

With team members in North America, EMEA, Asia and Australia-New Zealand, we are uniquely positioned to deliver Microsoft Dynamics 365, ERP, CRM, business process, analytics and collaboration solutions to clients across the globe. The largest independent Microsoft Dynamics partner in the world, DXC Eclipse serves more than 4,000 clients across multiple industries. Our practice delivers services and solutions that positively impact our world today and into the future.

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T 877.744.1360www.dxc.technology/dxceclipse

About DXC Technology

DXC Technology (DXC: NYSE) is the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, serving nearly 6,000 private and public-sector clients from a diverse array of industries across 70 countries. The company’s technology independence, global talent and extensive partner network deliver transformative digital offerings and solutions that help clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. DXC Technology is recognized among the best corporate citizens globally. For more information, visit www.dxc.technology.

© 2018 DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved. ECL-059. June 2018