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 What Role Does Culture Play in CRM? Expert: Rich Gallagher, Client Support Manager, The CBORD Group Why does one company implement a CRM strategy and succeed, and another one end up with higher costs and worse service? More than likely, the roots of this lie in the underlying culture of a service organization - and CRM can ultimately become a change agent for this culture, for better or worse. Let's look at some common drivers of corporate culture, and see how they influence your CRM strategy - and vice versa: 1. Respect. Respect for team members and customers is a seemingly obvious virtue. But for many firms, many well-intentioned daily business decisions can run counter to building a culture of respect - and CRM magnifies these tendencies. Your system strategy can range all the way from giving your support team visibility and knowledge, to micro-managing their call times and bathroom breaks, depending upon the culture behind your implementation. 2. Execution. In the help desk arena, execution is much more than meeting SLAs. It involves seeing the world through your customers' eyes. Take Dell, for example. In the 80s, they invested in CRM long before it became a buzzword, initially to drive a 24-hour service infrastructure, and later a strong e-support strategy. Today, they've gone from a college dorm room to the world's largest computer vendor in just 17 years. Conversely, some companies stop thinking like customers when they implement CRM ("Let's cut the back line in half and implement a knowledgebase."), and often pay a price for it. 3. Getting close to customers. This is supposed to be the over-arching point of CRM - get to know your customers better, and use the data to profit from this knowledge - by making more of what people buy, serving them more efficiently, etc. But some companies use CRM to harness this voice of their customers (by tracking metrics and improving content channels), while others inadvertently use it to stifle that voice (by placing roadblocks between the customer and service, and not tracking quality.). 4. Teamwork. A workgroup is not necessarily a team, and CRM can enhance or inhibit the ability to work as a team, with shared team goals. A provocative question: what kinds of metrics can your own team mine from their CRM system? Can they tell you how your helpdesk is running? If you woke them up at 4 AM, how accurately could they describe the pulse of your operations? 5. Ability to change. Do the things that customers are telling you find their way into new ways of doing things? Ideally, CRM data should drive a process of continuous improvement in your products and services, and turn your support organization into the strategic "voice of the customer." If your CRM isn't driving organizational change, it isn't working. Factors like these help explain why some cultures can invest large sums in CRM and have substantially improved service, while others invest equally large sums and actually make it worse. Cultures who thrive on teamwork, and who learn and adapt, suddenly have much more customer data to drive it. Conversely, in cultures who don't, CRM will often drive a blame-oriented focus on "the numbers." Either way, the end result of CRM is that it often magnifies the culture - good or bad - that your organization had beforehand. Rich Gallagher is Client Support Manager at The CBORD Group, and author of several books on service and support, including his latest "Delivering Legendary Customer Service: Seven Steps to Success" (Oasis Press). Visit him on-line at: http://www.legendaryservice.org
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