VideoAltogether, BMC involved 175 account managers, customer support staff, and other salespeople in the third CRM redesign. Why the parade? The company's management wanted to "make sure processes fit what these individuals needed from the system," Gardner explains.
The business processes were designed around sales roles and their key needs. In fact, Meyers, the CRM guru, actually came from the sales side of BMC. During the third try at deploying a CRM system, he headed a cross-functional team dedicated to making sure the rollout was successful. That group included the director of finance, director of customer support, and several sales and IT executives.
Gardner, the CIO, was held accountable to deliver a return on the project. "Fortunately, we'd learned quite a bit the last two times how to set up meaningful metrics that would match CRM to our business objectives," he says. "We have 32 different ways of measuring ROI, including cost per customer service call, cost per customer sales lead, and productivity of account manager by geography."
So far, those metrics are telling a different tale than the first two times BMC tried deploying a CRM system.
For example, it now costs BMC $125 to process a customer order, compared with $800 a year ago. And sales reps are saving on average two hours a week (a 7 percent improvement) getting hold of customers by phone. "Sales reps tell me the time they used to spend putting together sales forecasts they now spend on strategies how to make that forecast a reality," Gardner says.
Perhaps the most telling metric, however, is the CRM take-up rate. It's nearly 100 percent.
Wait State
Dow Chemical is another company that invested millions of dollars in a CRM initiative that didn't gel for several years. Management at the Midland, Michigan-based specialty and commodities chemical provider plunked down an estimated $50 million to buy Siebel CRM software licenses in 1995 — knowing full well years would pass before it would implement the technology.
Explains Mack Murrell, Dow global director of customer interface: "Our IT strategy is to buy early, then wait."
In the case of its CRM initiative, Dow management held off implementing the software for nearly four years. Executives at the $27-billion-in-revenue company spent that time making sure business process changes were in place before rolling out a companywide CRM application. "Companies often think CRM is just technology," notes Murrell. "But it is people, processes, and technology — in that order."
Close from Gartner says Dow's strategy is interesting. "They bought all this CRM software cheap because it was new," she adds. "It would cost other companies twice as much to replicate what they did."
In 1999, Dow finally rolled out its "One Face to the Customer" CRM strategy. That strategy calls for measuring customer interface costs and activities per contact channel across its global enterprise, a procedure that Close says is overlooked by more than 85 percent of organizations. "They basically want to become the easiest supplier in the world to do business with," she notes. "They're still on that journey."
Indeed, Murrell says only 35 percent of Dow's global sales force is hooked into the CRM system, though the goal is all of them by 2003. "We're up and running, with the solution implemented in all our call centers, inside sales and in customer service," he explains. "The thing we're working on now is reengineering the entire order management process.
Adds Murrell: "Once that is done, we can glue all of this together."
The gluing will probably take some time, too.
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