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There is an old saying that I used to hear from my dad's
friends: "I knew you when you were just a twinkle in
your old man's eye." After a thousand conversations with
managers and executives about CRM and its place in their organizations it is
wholly apparent that CRM twinkles in many eyes, today. Executives and managers
understand that they need more than what they have right now, they feel a
definite longing. However, they are not yet sure of where they want to go or how
they are going to get there. Yet. (Now, we'll drop the love metaphor before it
gets us in trouble...)
So to help them on their way lets put directions on the CRM map. We'll start
with a simple but very important one: Collaboration. In one sense an enterprise
is really nothing more than collaboration. Internally people collaborate
constantly to move product and services to customers. Externally, sales and
service collaborate with customers, or clients if you wish, and bring the
client's voice back inside the enterprise where it becomes the center of further
collaboration.
When we collaborate successfully the output is better products and services,
delighted customers and, sight unseen, knowledge. We can measure the quality and
value of products and services, and we can measure our ability to attract and
retain customers. But have we ever tried to measure the knowledge that we
produce?
Well, first of all we have to capture the knowledge. How difficult is it
to capture knowledge? Plenty. We capture knowledge around products and service
offerings, and we capture knowledge around customers. Most knowledge requires a
link to both product and customer to be well understood. And what tool do
we use to capture knowledge? How do we manage the knowledge that we capture?
To date the efforts to enable collaboration have been very successful,
insofar as adoption of the tool. Email would be the best example. We no longer
have to wait in line outside the manager's office. We simply fire off an email
and ten mails later our collaboration forges a solution
(knowledge) with a nifty little audit trail. The only problem is that we
have buried the knowledge in an email inbox to which only the senders
and receivers have access. And as they move on ... so goes the knowledge.
Why do executives, managers and staff adopt email so readily? And
what does this adoption portend for other collaboration tools? The
answer is time and ease of use. If a collaboration tool is easy to use and
saves time like email we can expect fairly quick adoption. The other key is
that, like email, other collaboration tools must have executives and senior
management as regular users. The top down approach means that at each successive
layer of the enterprise there is a compelling reason to use the tool: Your
manager expects it.
For CRM to move from twinkle in the CEO's eye to an implemented, valuable
solution it must have collaboration at its core. Knowledge workers demand it.
They will not be bothered with a CRM system that takes up time without a
corresponding decrease of time elsewhere. Knowledge workers are pre-disposed to
collaboration - witness the email adoption curve, a straight line up. If the
collaboration tool also enables knowledge capture and re-use, the knowledge
worker has a win-win proposition. How many meetings can I escape and how many
phone calls can I avoid if we embed and reuse the knowledge (solutions)
generated daily in the tool we use to collaborate?
CRM as a collaboration tool is a huge win for knowledge workers. But
how about customers? Or executives and managers? We'll cover these in the next
post. | 
