10 Customer Relationship Management Tips to Avoid Failure

Customer relationship management is undoubtedly taking lots of actions and decisions to give customers the best experience and maximum satisfaction using your business or services. It involves knowing your customers, knowing what they want and how they want, and serving it to them in the most profitable ways for the business. But, it isn’t always a rosy experience as sometimes, one can end up triggering the direct opposite of satisfaction in the customers. As such, one needs to be careful about how to go about the whole process.

This is to help you understand some very important do’s and don’ts about customer relationship management to avoid failure. Here are the 10 tips to avoid failures in your customer relationship management and increase sales.

10 Quality Tips On How To Fix Failures In Customer Relationship Management

“The real test is not whether you avoid this failure because you won’t. It is whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.” – Barack Obama.

So you experienced failure with implementing crm for your business and you are beginning to think it is not worth it; this post is for you. Jump right in with us as we take a look at 10 solid tips to fix failures in Customer Relationship Management.

Businesses are set up to ease customer pain points for the purpose of making profits and consequently business growth. Customer relationship management marketing is a means to this goal; so yes, when all businesses kick start a marketing strategy or customer relationship management customizations, their hearts are always in the right place. Gathering more customer insights using both structured and unstructured data to better tailor your company’s activities to better suit the customer and thus increase customer satisfaction.

It all makes sense right? Yes, of course, it does. However, this sweet outcome is not what is encountered most times when businesses set out on this customer relationship management marketing journey. Lots and lots of failures have been experienced by different companies over the years.

Tech is not CX. Just because you buy a customer relationship management or experience management platform, that does not mean you're "doing CX." – Stephanie Thum stated in this tweet a major cause of failure in Customer relationship management for most companies.

As a result of this, we have come up with some quality tips on how to fix failures in CRM marketing. Although it is a fact that in marketing, the approach is never a one-size-fits-all scenario as business deliverables, as well as customer behavior, differs across different niches. But, understanding the underlying principles of these tips and being able to apply them properly to your unique situation is going to help increase the chances of success for your CRM marketing as well as fix certain mistakes.

You should keep the following in mind:

1. Think About the User First Before Picking Any Customer Relationship Management Tool

Customer satisfaction is achieved by considering and improving two things namely customer insights and data and user efficiency (i.e., better working systems for sales reps, customer agents, marketers, etc.). But clearly, one is more pressing than the other and that is customer insights and data. After all, any effort put into customer relationship management marketing is ultimately for the benefit of the customer; again, the customer comes first!

Before making any choice of sales customer relationship management tool, you must be sure that the tool actually maps the customer's journey. It should provide a visual representation of a customer’s journey, showing all the different stages in the customer lifecycle starting from the initial contact (or purchase) until after the final purchase. This puts everything about the customer in one place visually, allowing you to spot areas that need improvement in terms of customer satisfaction.

2. Choose Only Scalable Customer Relationship Management Tools

Customer relationship management has always been about data, data, and more data. This fact is playing out in avoiding failure in customer relationship management once again.

Customer relationship management is a means to an end. It is a means to business growth and expansion. Data analysis has made it very easy to speculate how big a business will be in the coming years. Hence, one must keep in mind the business goals and objectives, the estimated projections of growth and expansion of the business because it is very important that the customer relationship management tool or solution being used by any business is able to scale and rise up to the increasing demands of the business across the different stages of growth and development. Remember, customer relationship management marketing is a means to an end of business growth and development.

3. Social Media is a Customer Relationship Management Tool! Choose CRM Tool that Involves Social Media Interactions with Customers

Marketing is all about getting the word out to your target audience about all the good deliverables your business has in store for them. To get across to them, you need to go where they are! And as of today, social is where everybody’s at! In fact, there is hardly any category of customers not found on any of the social media channels.

Any CRM platform or tool you’ll be using must make provisions for obtaining social information and engagement on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This information helps to gather more and more customer insights and ultimately leads to better customer satisfaction. To avoid failure in CRM marketing, never leave out Social!

4. Establish Well Defined Metrics to Measure Success

In business and marketing, overall success is more about the journey instead of the destination. This means, the business should be able to track progress by knowing where it was, where it is right now, and where it wants to be in a stipulated time.

To be able to do this effectively, metrics of measurement must be very clearly defined by the business before even consulting or choosing any customer relationship management software yet. A business should be able to picture what it wants and how it intends to get there in the shortest possible time. Failure to know this is one of the leading causes of failure. You can try lead scoring to categorize your qualifed leads.

5. Align Any CRM System Or Strategy Properly with the Organizational Goals

Similar to establishing well-defined metrics of measuring success according to your organizational goals. You need to set the traditional SMART (Specific, measurable, achievable, Relevant, Timely) goals. This can be likened to “knowing what you want before going to the market” to avoid being all over the market and falling for just about anything.

Valuable metrics include customer lifetime value (CLV), which helps predict how much revenue can be generated from a single customer, revenue generated by a campaign, and customer acquisition cost (CAC). These metrics help you see how much you are spending and just how much benefits you are receiving in return. This will help you see if the CRM tool picked is helping the business.

6. Decisions and Strategies Should Always be Data-Backed

Any customer relationship management strategy or platform that makes decisions on mere speculations and not tested and trusted data should not be encouraged. You see, before you make any decision, the numbers must be supporting that action because in the field of customer relationship management it seems so. If the numbers do not say so, then it's not the right decision.

Ready to Close More Deals & Streamline Sales Process with CRM.io?
Sign Up 14 Day Trial

Data helps you know what to look out for and where to look for it to help fix problems more quickly. Any customer relationship management tool or platform your business would be using should have strong analytics features that will help you speed up your sales process for faster business growth.

7. Integrate Your CRM Systems with Other Systems

It is no longer news that customers are now spread thin across different preferred channels and that to get your word to them you need to be on those channels as well.

However, it’s going to be a lot of work and even more confusing. Therefore, your customer relationship management platform needs to integrate all these platforms and channels to make the task of tracking customer insights very clean and effective. This will fix the mistakes to a reasonable extent.

8. Choose Only Customer Relationship Management Software and Platforms That Solve Your Organizational Pain Points

Knowing what you want and where you want to be before consulting any CRM platform cannot be overemphasized. If your SMART goals are clearly stated, success is already 50% achieved. The next important thing to do is find and research customer relationship management tools and platforms with the ability and features to help you achieve those goals.

9. Formulate Automated Business Processes

Automated business processes refer to a series of carefully thought-out action sequences such as sending notifications, approvals, invoices, etc. for the sole purpose of achieving set business goals. Automation is an integral factor for success in that it is faster and attends to customer needs at the right times.

10. Set Realistic Goals

Attaining business goals is more about the journey than the destination. The earlier businesses start realizing this fact, the better. Hence, when consulting or adopting any customer relationship management strategy, tools, or platforms, it is highly imperative to know the status of the business, and the goals that can be achieved at the time. CRM, in particular, is a process as relationships do not just sprout in a day, it takes time to build trust and understanding that should help you set only SMART realistic goals. Remember it is a marathon and not a sprint; settle in for the long haul!

Some Customer Relationship Management Failures and What Went Wrong

To gain a better perspective of the earlier listed tips, it is important to see how considering these things or neglecting them plays out in real-life scenarios. These cases properly demonstrated intents for success via CRM but at the end of the day, their expectations were not met.

CIGNA Healthcare In 2002:

Cigna Corporation is a health insurance company in the US. At the end of 2001, CIGNA’s membership was about 13.3 million, but by the end of 2002, memberships were down by 12.5 million. The management reported that this was a result of misquoting their number of customers. 6% of the company's healthcare members were lost in 2002 alone.

Although about 1 billion USD was directed towards restructuring their IT and CRM systems at the healthcare division, the cost of implementing that restructuring was greater than that, and the misconceptions about the timing of yielding the benefits of the project, the project was still a total failure.

This is illustrated in the statement of the new president of Cigna, Patrick Welch, in 2002. He said, "The cost is greater than anticipated, much of the economic and service benefits are yet to be realized, and transformation shortfalls have led to service shortfalls, which have led to lower new sales and [customer] retention."

This is a classic example of failing to set realistic goals, making decisions without adequate data, and probably lacking measurable metrics to assess progress. This failure led to a huge amount of customer dissatisfaction and consequently business decline.

You can read more about this case here.

HERSHEY’S Scary Halloween:

In 1999, Hershey was one of the nation’s largest producers of candy. And the candy business peaks around October and December; the Halloween season! In fact, 40% of sales are made during that period. Unfortunately for Hershey, they were unable to supply their customers at this very crucial period due to customer relationship management-related issues.

You see, earlier in the year, Hershey had pumped about 112 million USD towards modernizing business practices by rolling out new customer data and delivery systems. This was to increase customer satisfaction. But, what went wrong?

It was a classic case of failing to "set achievable goals" as Hershey had expected the implementations to be complete just before taking orders and deliveries during the Halloween season. However, although they knew that the business processes were intricate yet followed a more aggressive approach that put all the infrastructure on at the same time. The project ran behind schedule and Hershey was unable to make it in time to send out delivery by Halloween. A scary one indeed for Hershey.

The inability to set realistic goals, lack of metrics for measuring success, and leaving out customers in the decision-making process, as well as inadequate data amongst many other things, played out in this failure.

When CRM is improperly implemented, financial losses such as budget overruns, high running costs post-implementation, low ROI, and customer service quality decline in terms of negative brand perception, slower time to market, and customer frustration will be experienced. Sales effectiveness and cultural impact also experience a downtrend, and the reasons are always in and around failure to effectively and accurately follow the tips earlier listed. Businesses should take note.

Concluding Thoughts

CRM is a means to an end; the end being customer satisfaction for business growth. To avoid failure, always keep in mind the tips listed above. Any decision should be backed by data and have the interest of the customer as the number one deciding factor. Reasonable metrics for measuring success should be set to ensure that the approach is more focused on the journey and what can be learned in the process rather than just the final destination. Understand your business niche and customer behavior and make decisions that best suit them. If all these factors are properly and accurately considered, attaining maximum satisfaction for business growth is just within your reach!