What Best Practices in CRM Looks Like

First, let's get the concept of best practices out of the way. At first glance people get intimidated by the term. But its essence is in measuring how your company is progressing relative to your goals for changing how you interact with customers, channels and even employees. Best practices are never a one-size-fits-all proposition; for best practices to work they need to be customized to your company's specific needs.

So why do so many people talk about best practices?

Because it's not in the emulating or imitating of best practices that companies get the most benefit it's in setting the highest standards possible from what others have learned and creating, executing and managing strategies that get to that same level of performance.

Bottom line: Best practices are not about imitating someone else's performance; it's learning from it to set your own high objectives for business performance.

How does CRM contribute to best practices?

At first glance, any sentence with Best practices and CRM in it would make you think some vendor was trying to sell you the full suite of their software, or at the very least, someone is trying to tell you that CRM software, in general, is the panacea for all your problems ?the golden bullet. There's in reality no such thing; all business change is gradual and takes a true commitment to completely revamp processes ingrained into your company.

Bottom line: Think of CRM as a set of strategies that can propel you to your goals. Focus first on processes and the need to re-vamp them first, applying CRM technology selectively. Companies getting the best possible performance with CRM are doing precisely this: they build out their business strategies and get them functioning efficiently first, and bring in CRM to better prospect, sell, serve and track performance of customer interactions across all lines of business.

Isn't Best Practices Expensive?

You can't buy your way into a high performing, market-driven company, the drive and intensity to change and become focused first on the customer and have all systems, both manual and electronic, aligned to the needs of every department serving the customer has to happen first. Buying your way into best practices is as fruitless as trying to buy your way to a lower cholesterol score or a lower weight ?sure your physician will take your payments but lasting change has to start inside first. The same holds true for lasting change in your company.

To get to the highest level of performance for your company ?in essence best practices ?you need to tackle the toughest problems first and the ones that are turning your company into less of a competitor in the markets you serve. Take for example the process your company uses for providing customers with quotes and responses to special order requests. If this takes weeks instead of months you are at a competitive disadvantage. Best practices in this area, in aggregate, is around 24 hours or less across many industries ?so applying technology on top of the process is where the true payoff is.

Bottom line: Never try to buy your way into best practices ?it's not possible. Turn first to your most crippled and inefficient processes first and then selectively apply CRM technology.

Next: >> Lessons Learned on Best Practices in CRM