Introducing the Dynamics Café ~ Proceed at your own risk

In my readings this week I came across this blogger:

Matt Keenan is a 20+ year veteran of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market and has extensive experience in sales, implementation, and effective adoption of CRM solutions from small companies to large enterprises. He has had the opportunity to work with customers like Dow Chemical, Wal-Mart, ACNielsen, United States Department of Defense, Archer Daniels Midland, and United Airlines on their CRM initiatives. Visit his blog: The Truth About CRM.

The first post I read was so fresh and important I wanted to highlight it to my CRM friends.

D’oh! ~ Homer J. Simpson, Nuclear Safety Technician

A lot of my posts have focused on what you should do to be successful in your CRM adventure. Things like embedded change management, building Centers of Excellence, and developing a Brand are all positive actions that you can take. Today’s post is going to take a slightly different tack because I think that there are several things that you shouldn’t do that are just as important as the things that you should to. With that in mind, I respectfully present the start of the CRM Deadly Sins list.

Deadly Sin #1: Too Much Structure: CRM Systems, at least the good ones, allow you to quickly and easily build, test and deploy system driven and human driven workflows. The natural inclination is to use this capability set of grossly over-engineer your solution and build out processes for everything under the sun. Don’t. You users will quickly get frustrated with too much structure in the early days of the CRM implementation and quickly move away from your intended targets. There is a natural inflection point inside your business between effective process structure and insanity. You need to find that point.

Deadly Sin #2: Too Much Notification: A close corollary to the excessive use of workflow and structure is the excessive use of notifications, alerts and messages in your solution. Driving too much notification to the users reduces the true impact and value of this feature set and creates a sense of clutter or noise with your solution as the source. People will quickly tune out and the technically advanced ones will create a rule in their inbox that automatically routes the message to a “circular” file. My suggestion is that you keep your initial set of notifications to a bare minimum. Focus on key events like opportunities closing, high priority cases being opened, etc. Then expand with caution based upon user feedback.

Please read more here…

I am not only sharing this with you but will use this as a permanent bookmark to a great read/blogger. I have also subscribed to the blog.

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 06, 2011
  Nice Find! Thanks