Gartner CRM Summit: Excellence Awards feature SalesLogix, E.Piphany, and eLoyalty

One of yesterday's sessions featured three companies that had achieved CRM excellence in the areas of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service. I love real life case studies because they take the academic thoughts discussed in the rest of the conference and pull them into reality. Below are the three nominees and their stories.

Harry Rosen, Inc. -- Excellence in Sales

Harry Rosen is a an upscale men's wear retailer. Think Armani and Hugo Boss suits. Most retailers segment or cluster their customers and drop direct mail. Harry Rosen didn't want to view customers from the 10,000 feet level. Their interaction was more personal.

"We have a very strong one to one relationship between our associates and our customers." Steve Jackson, CIO, explained. "We needed a tool to facilitate that relationship."

Jackson needed something that could integrate Point of Sale with a front office CRM system. The hope was that a solid solution would make information easily available to associates on the floor. They also needed to automate business processes to avoid under or over calling their customers, while providing tools to manage and measure from the executive level.

Harry Rosen chose to go with a best of breed model, selecting Sage CRM SalesLogix for the CRM piece and PCMS Data Fit to help with Point of Sale. Keeping associates on board throughout the process combined with the right tools led to great success. Jackson reports that his company now has a central repository for client data. They can use this data to set automated triggers for follow up tasks, and build lists that auto prioritize based on the importance of the client and call frequency.

Jackson has been extremely pleased with the results. Growth in sales and improved customer satisfaction in the Canadian division has led to a roll out to the U.S. to be completed later this year.

"We had to find a system that was very easy to use, very intuitive, while still being rich in features. We feel we are operating the most advanced CRM system in the retail industry today."

NetBank, Inc. -- Excellence in Marketing

NetBank is an on-line bank facing increasing competition. They were the first in the space but are now feeling heat from both the online presence of traditional banks like Bank of America, and low cost new entrants, like ING Direct.

NetBank established a goal to sell value to customers and improve up and cross sell opportunities through their CRM strategy. They decided to focus on establishing a consistent and playful brand personality and foster customer loyalty. There was great emphasis placed on being seen as a partner, and not a product pusher.

Matthew Shepard , Marketing and Communications, explained, "People don't mind receiving information as long as it is relevant and the timing is right."

Partnering with E.Piphany, NetBank was able to greatly improve their communication and overall brand image. Shepard mentioned many metrics to prove their success, but the one he was most proud of was their cross sell ration. Since the implementation, NetBank has increased its cross sell ratio from 1.6% to 2.9%.

The vision has spread throughout the company and Shepard is extremely pleased with the success of the project.

"CRM is about listening to the customer, understanding their needs, and responding appropriately."

UnitedHealth Group -- Excellence in Customer Service, Overall Winner

The UnitedHealth Group (UHG) is an 80 billion dollar health and well being corporation that needed a way to optimize their call center interactions.

"Health care is a very personal business." John Reinke, Senior VP, explained. "Customers are calling because they are hurt and sick, or their loved ones are hurt and sick. We want to make the experience as friendly as possible."

UHG was constantly trying to improve the customer experience, but to do so, they needed to find coachable moments or broken processes. The way most call centers monitor calls is by randomly listening in on live or recorded conversations. This method allows only 1% of calls to be monitored, insufficient to improve interactions or find broken processes.

"At that rate, the opportunity to find a coachable moment is very small," Reinke commented.

UHG partnered with eLoyalty to implement a system of behavioral analytics designed in part by NASA. The system monitors 100% of the calls and highlights specific coachable moments and broken processes. Taking customer's spoken words, the analytics tool converts them to text complete with notes on long silence periods. The system then analyzes these and can monitor the level of distress detected in a callers voice. Depending on the level of stress, and the type of call, specific recommendations can be made of how best to handle the call.

After everything is done, management can compile reports to find the specific instances where distress levels were high. If it's a rare occurrence they can better train the employee taking the call. If it happens often, it could be a red flag for a broken process. Amazed? So was I.

It works too. The system has reduced the average handling time of a customer by 18%. More importantly there has been a 20-30% reduction in customer distress. The customers aren't the only ones who love it. An unintended benefit was the increased employee retention UHG now experiences.

"People go to work everyday hoping to do a good job." Reinke explained. "What derails them is a lack of good tools or processes."

Obviously UHG has done a good job in providing the right tools and processes.

Apologies for the long post, but I think they're all great stories. We'll wrap up the Gartner blogging later today with some overall themes and lessons learned from the conference.

Gartner CRM Summit: Why Implement CRM?

In the key note speech Scott Nelson mentioned four reasons why you would implement CRM. It's become very apparent over this week that 2006 marks the year where we undergo a major shift in the reason for CRM implementation.

Nelson cited these four reasons:

• Extend customer breadth and depth of relationship (Grow Business)
• Minimize transaction barriers and reduce costs (Save Money)
• Use and enhance brand equity
• Focus on customer value and satisfaction

Most companies say they want to do all four with their implementation, and to a certain extent they can, but companies must choose one to focus on above all others. This will drive your implementation.

"The reality is that you are working on one or more of these at a time." Nelson said. "But which is most important? It matters."

When CRM first became popular in the early 90's businesses focused on growing their business through CRM. They wanted to be able to automate process to sell more, faster. They hoped to tap current customers for further growth through up selling and cross selling.

When the recession hit in the early 2000's companies driving forces moved to cost optimization. They hoped by automating internal processes they could save money.

Now as we turn an economic corner and many businesses are optimistic, Gartner states that business growth is again driving CRM implementation.

"We are seeing businesses being aggressive again and beginning to focus on growth." Analyst Sharon Mertz said. "This is a fundamental change from the early part of the decade which focused on cost optimization."

Throughout the conference, Gartner has been optimistic about the future of the economy and the market for CRM. Companies focusing on growing their business is a good sign for everyone.

Gartner CRM Summit: Predictions for 2006 and Customer Centric Business

There was a great keynote speech delivered this morning on some predictions for the future of CRM and the importance of making your organization customer focused. I worried yesterday that some of the material might be too academic and focused solely on Fortune 500 giants. This morning, Scott Nelson, Managing VP of Application Strategy and Governance, gave us actionable information that any size organization can use.

"As the world changes, as people access your company more and through different channels, firms are realizing they can't just do business as usual," Nelson said. "The world has changed. You need to understand what your customers want and how to collaborate with them."

Even the smallest company needs to realize that they can no longer just build a product, advertise and hope for the best. You need to interact with customers to find out what they truly need and together build a product or service that addresses a real need. That's how businesses of today are succeeding.

As the above shows, customers are interacting with companies in all kinds of manners. They speak with your sales staff, your customer service reps, your delivery drivers, your return department. They call you, visit you in person, and browse your website. Every one of these interactions matter.

"CRM is only as good as your weakest channel and last interaction with your customer.", Nelson powerfully stated.

He went on to give an example of a company that spent millions of dollars to hire the best sales people, the most understanding customer service reps, the friendliest delivery people. Every channel was perfect except their website was difficult to navigate and their return policy was poor. A customer that had to deal with either of these business elements was instantly turned off. All of the money spent in the other areas was for nothing.

He also made some predictions for the CRM landscape in 2006. Here are the ones that directly impact our businesses.

• Single view of the customer is huge -- Companies have finally realized that one of the most important benefits of CRM is the sharing of data. The fact that a sales man can see if a customer has any outstanding service issues before he calls can be huge. Business silos who don't want to share data prevent this key benefit from happening. In 2006, Nelson predicts that these barriers will be broken down, to an extent, in order to benefit the whole.
• Move to SOA will lead to slow growth in functionality -- As vendors begin to move Services Orientated Architecture (SOA) most of the work will be done in the background. Long term these solutions will be technically far superior to what exists today, but this comes at the expense of functionality. Little R & D will be done on functionality, so for the most part users should expect to see the same functionality for the next 2-3 years.
• 30% of SFA will be SaaS -- Lot's of acronyms, I know. Nelson predicts that the Software as a Service (Saas) will gain popularity for sales force automation (SFA). That's good news for the CRM vendors who practice Saas. Firms like salesforce.com, sagecrm.com, netsuite.com, etc... will reap these benefits.

Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question, also gave a wonderful speech on loyalty. I'll write more about what he had to say when I discuss his book next month. My expectations were greatly exceeded on how informative and entertaining both of these speeches were.

Gartner CRM Summit: Project Managment Best Practices & Mobility

I'm posting in between sessions so I'll have to be brief. I wanted to get up the good information from yesterday's pitches before heading off for more info.

Project Management Best Practices

The key take away from this session was to make sure you have an internal vision and strategy in place and keep to it. This is what will make your CRM project a success.

Matthew Goldman hammered home the need for extensive planning upfront. "This planning process may seem heavy handed at first look, but these processes you put in line today, save you time, money and effort down the line."

"Your CRM strategy provides the foundation for the entire project." Goldman stated, citing this process that builds step by step.

• Business Strategy and Sourcing Alignment (Are objectives clear?)
• Baseline of Current Environment (Mark the start line.)
• Create a Business Case (Mark the Finish Line)
• Decision Point (Where are OUR resources?)
• Shortlist Providers (How can we make this happen?)

So only after resolving your in house issues and clearly defining your project strategies, should you begin collecting information on the enabling technology.

CRM Mobility

William Clark, Research VP, discussed mobile applications and stated we are in currently in the third generation. The first generation focused on voice, the second on email and messaging, and now in the third we are seeing the first signs of solid applications, though nothing is perfected. In the fourth generation, which Gartner estimates will occur in 2009, there will be consolidation and commoditization heralding the age of the mobile application.

While vendors have been pushing mobile CRM for the past decade, it's only in the last 2-3 years that it's become a reality. Even these applications have their limits, but compared to previous iterations, you can have real CRM on a mobile device. Our own customers validate these claims, and should be happy to hear that in the coming generation that should have nearly seamless CRM on their mobile devices.

Clark also touched on what makes a good mobile application device and considered four factors.

• Rule of Four -- By far the most important, "Users should be able to get any useful information within four clicks. Anything less is going to cause user annoyance."
• Continuity of Look and Feel Across Apps -- How different does an application look on a PC vs. your mobile device. If it looks and works differently it's a problem.
• Security Aspect -- How easy is to administer and how safe does it keep the data. "Right now we hear a lot about stolen data on laptops." Clark said, "It's only a matter of time before we hear about lost or stolen data on a mobile device."
• Battery life -- "The Achilles heel across all of mobile is still battery life." Clark mentioned. "All these new applications are a drain. If someone comes to you with a really cool application you have to think, 'Yeah, but what is that doing to my battery?"

Gartner CRM Summit: Day One Observations

As I mentioned last month, I'm excitedly attending the Gartner CRM Summit being held here in Chicago. Over the next three days I hope to give you a daily update on the best practices and latest trends in CRM, so check back often for updates.

Today was the first day and so was naturally pretty low key. One presenter referred to it as the "pace car day of the conference." Every one has a chance to rev up their engines before we really get going. Here's my initial thoughts on the conference.

Drinking Water through a Fire Hose -- In just the two sessions I attended today, I was completely blown away by the amount of information being presented. I'm familiar with the Gartner research on CRM, so I noticed that material from at least eight of their research notes was being pulled into an hour long session. Those notes cost at least $199 a piece, so getting eight was nice. However the sheer amount of information is going to be challenging to absorb.

Gartner Note Related -- The Gartner notes are essentially research papers that Gartner has written on a given topic. Seeing as the information has already been written I see why they pull from this source so often. One concern I have is that these sessions could become nothing more than advertisements for these notes. The analysts even refer to their sessions as "pitches". I'm sure it means something else to them, but to me a "pitch" has definite selling connotations. I don't think that's going to happen because no specific titles have been mentioned (much to my slight annoyance, I'd like to purchase one or two on the topics discussed). We'll see as the conference progresses.

Fortune 500 Focused -- Gartner's bread and butter are large organizations who pay 10 to 45 thousand dollars a month just to be a client. Their notes are focused on this group, so it follows that the conference would be similar. The challenge, for me, is bringing these large concepts aimed at the Fortune 500, back to the everyday business organization.

Cutting Edge, Forward Looking, and At Times Academic -- Another area, where I will have to bring it back to the everyday business. Gartner is extremely cutting edge and forward thinking. Information was regularly presented today discussing different aspects of the technology landscape in 2010. Their job is to know revolutionary trends before they occur, but I think most people are more concerned with what can impact their business immediately.

Real Access with Analysts -- By far, my favorite observation from day one. The setting is pretty intimate thus far. As someone who isn't a client of Gartner, I've never had one on one time with analysts. The only way people like me can interact with Gartner information is by reading it. Here I can ask questions and spend a couple minutes after a presentation chatting with the presenters. Instead of just blindly trusting information, I can get behind the scenes and find out why.

Real information on Project Management and Mobility from today as well as info from tomorrow's sessions. Stay tuned.