The broader value proposition of your CRM system to your company

It has been interesting reading blog contributions on CRM over the last year, where by far the most dominant types have concerned CRM as a field of specialisation. On the opposite end of the scale, you will look hard and long before you find any articles discussing the integration of CRM with the rest of the organisation. And this is a pity, because the effectiveness of a CRM implementation increases dramatically when we consider it in the context of the entire business.

The Balanced Scorecard increased our understanding of how business operates as an entity in a strategic context rather than just as a combination of silos more than 20 years ago already. In the same way, CRM does not operate in a silo within the traditional marketing silo. The fact that it operates at all is the result of a complex context of people, process and technology, itself in a context of strategy, which also incorporates the business model of the enterprise.

The fact that the interaction of CRM with other specialist areas within the organisation is so pervasive means that we can better manage the effectiveness of our CRM implementation if we increasingly consider CRM measurement in a broader context. Indeed, for large organisations spending hundreds of millions of dollars on various technology implementations, it is becoming a board imperative to improve their understanding of the various technology implementations, and a starting point for this understanding is by an enlarged context of measurement for, as in this case, a CRM implementation. The measures are not complex, incorporating aspects such as:

• People productivity measures as it relates to CRM initiatives (customer-facing and back office)
• Process efficiency measures as it relates to CRM measures, and
• The technology component cost of the CRM initiative as an element of the cost of acquisition, the cost of cross-selling, or the cost of upselling

Along with existing measures such as those associated with increased revenue (acquisition, cross-selling, up-selling, annuity), decreased cost (operating and capital) and decreased risk (brand and operating), these measures, best shown as trends, help demonstrate how the organisation as a whole is becoming more efficient as a result of the CRM implementation. , which may put the results of e.g. improved sales in a much better context. Contemporary measures such as employee engagement are especially relevant in the context of big systems implementations.

Furthermore, any modern discussion on CRM should probably be explicit about the role of Social Media in it too. This becomes a lot easier to understand when we realise that the various components of marketing create an integrated corporate organism, incorporating CRM, branding, advertising, PR, corporate communications, internal branding and social media etc. 

In closing, for CRM as a paradigm to show the full extent of its value proposition in a corporate context, itself a form of marketing ROI, it not only has to demonstrate how it integrates with the other spheres of marketing, of which it is but a part as per the above paragraph, but also the entire organisation as outlined earlier.