In the business world CRM and Knowledge Management seem to be the new buzz words of today. It seems that many investment banks are starting to look at the potential gain that a CRM system may bring to their business, and others are at the frontier of CRM implementation.

The Benefits

What is CRM? CRM in its simplest form behaves very much like contact management but on a much grander scale. It collects client related data, anything that you would have normally kept directly relating to your clients. The tool will allow you to cleverly sieve through the masses of client data collected from multiple channels and quickly retrieve the ones that are most relevant and important to you. Of course how this is done is largely according to your individual / departmental / firm’s needs and requirements.

The benefits of the CRM system can be further enhanced by highlighting Key clients, relationship managers, establishing a list of historical trends and potential future interests based on historic data. The potential is boundless in theory, limited only on scale and level of change the business can handle and accommodate.

CRM can also be a useful tool for internal audit, the information collated can be manipulated to quickly highlight a sales person’s dealings with certain clients, sales and trades commissions can be based upon this info. It can log interactions with clients to make senior managers aware whether or not Key Accounts are getting enough attention from your business. To advance it even further you can customise the system to use client information to automatically drive other internal systems, such as notification of news and research.

The advantage about having a global system is that this may also provide a good solution for business continuity. By pooling together all your valuable information it makes back up and recovery a more manageable task, and independent of location.  

Watch out for…  

The implementation of a CRM system will unify and consolidate the business as a whole and encourage the individuals to embrace the change in work flow and process that enforce the modern Customer-First corporate policy and culture.  Senior sponsors are essential in getting the message across to the community and stir excitement as well as commitment towards Sales, Marketing and Customer Services. Taking CRM as far as your imagination and technical feasibility will crush most peoples’ opinion of CRM being just a glorified address book.  

The scale of a CRM project can get out of control, as everyone wants a piece of the action. Focus must be driven by the business and reality checked by the technology and compliance with the business strategy.

Cultural Changes

The concept of CRM is the sharing of firm wide information. Your employees will no longer need to keep their little book of tricks of the trades with certain clients, but share it out with other colleagues in your group, or other division / departments to promote cross selling. This will mean more cooperation in team working, while making sick, holiday and leave cover easier to handle. However this scale of change may upset some peoples’ territorial view on their clients and their way of doing business.

Compliance

The information held about the client can potentially be fairly sensitive, i.e. children’s names etc. To be in compliance with the Data Protection Act before implementing client data into the system, there must be a way to get this information out on a per client basis.

To Buy or To Develop?

As a business looking into expenditure totalling millions of pounds / dollars on a product, what should you really expect in return? Should you buy or should you develop your own system? 

There are many off-the-shelf products that can be easily customized to suit your business needs. One of the largest CRM vendor is Siebel, who holds the majority market share in CRM. Siebel has recently acquired and merged its technology with a more web based application formerly called Janna, to offer an ever broader choice overall. Other CRM vendors include PeopleSoft which is mainly HR based, and Remedy which is a help desk ticket based system. Many technology companies such as Sybase and Oracle also provide a CRM solution, however they are not as well established or sophisticated.

Sometimes the needs of a business could be very specific, and vendors may not always have appreciation of certain details such as look and feel, flexibility of work process. When you sign a contract there might be legal obligation to pay for certain upgrades even though you are not 100% happy with their proposed solution. Another factor to consider is that any software changes that you may have paid for is owned by the vendor and they have the right to sell to other companies.

One alternative is to develop your own CRM system. This has the advantage of never truly needing to commit to the costly license fees and potential prohibitive third party consulting and support charges. It will however require a sophisticated level of knowledge, design and cooperation from technology and business to start with, and could be extremely difficult and expensive to maintain and upgrade in the long term.

It’s also important to assess business needs carefully, as well as future trends and stability of your vendor products.

Real life

The next logical question to ask would be was it worth it? Was it worth the amount of money and resources that was poured into the project? Are people really going to use it more than their out look address books or their note pads?

The general impression I get from other colleagues is that majority of the investment banks that has implemented the system has not used it to its full potential. They feel that the return of investment from the project does not match the money and effort spent on it.

In the general business world, more than 80% of CRM projects even failed to be properly implemented. This general lack of interest after some discouraging results tend to lead business into believing that the project was not successful. This may have many contributing factors such as lack of determination and focus from the senior management team, lack of good personal advertising, or the resistant for change from the end user. The failure to gain solid senior management support and adopt an user driven not a technology driven implementation mentality are and could be the biggest down fall for most CRM initiatives.

Louise Lee graduated from Imperial college in 1999, and started working at a global investment bank as an associate technician. She is currently a business analyst in a CRM project for the development team within the investment bank. You can reach her via email here. 

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