What can businesses learn from the changes triggered by the pandemic? Beyond the wholesale move to home working, are there trends that businesses can identify and adopt to speed up the recovery? Every article that I have read talking about the “New Normal” of socially distanced business has missed out practical steps that could support planning for the future. Can we apply our years of CRM experience to help you leverage technology, and drive the changes needed? So, here they are, our CRM lessons from the pandemic:
Positive changes
A more caring society, which recognises the contribution of others above the accumulation of wealth seems to be an emerging view of what the world will look like post-COVID 19. For those of us who have been supported through lockdown by neighbours and volunteers, this is an easy change to welcome. This has allowed negative views of once-respected businesses to wipe millions from share values. It must be said some of this negative sentiment has been driven by a growing sense of disconnection, a sense that very large businesses have become remote, that they no longer exist to serve customers.
Elsewhere over the weeks of lockdown, advertising and PR became significantly less effective, governments and corporations were comprehensively out-communicated by the acts of individuals, such as Captain Tom’s walk for the NHS, or the appearance of rainbows in virtually every window. Not for the first time brands risk being ignored as audiences reject messages that lack authenticity. The days of “Mad Men” mass-market advertising seem to be ending as audiences increasingly opt for personal, and personalised interaction.
These, and other changes, herald major changes in how businesses acquire, retain and develop long term profitable customer relationships.
For large organisations, the CRM challenge is to rebuild trust
In the “new normal” large organisations will need to adapt and change. Many of their current enterprise CRM projects have concentrated on profiling a single version of the customer. Post pandemic the need to increase the trust between customers and suppliers will necessitate different versions of the ideal customer for different parts of their product offering. Early indications are that just as teams changed how they worked and communicated in lockdown, so the management of customers will change have to change post lockdown.
Our view at Collier Pickard is that increasingly teams will look to ‘right-size’ their CRM tool to meets the customers’ needs as opposed to their own corporate needs. Small scale, rapidly implemented CRM products that can be configured without a project team and development sprints, could become the new must-have for those looking to remodel sales processes.
Those who doubt the appetite for change away from corporate software standards need only look to the success of Zoom during the lockdown.
Automation holds the key
The changes required to build trust will go far beyond a new series of nurture emails! The long slow journey back will require more active engagement with clients. More listening, less product pushing and the key resource will be time. However, with reductions in headcount, time may be in short supply.
The solution lies in freeing everyone across your organisation to focus on the customer and their needs. Time spent in report generation, or internal meetings, or “make-work”, needs to be replaced with time spent understanding and addressing customer needs.
This is no easy task. Many of the organisations that we have worked with grew their business support team as their number and complexity of processes and reports ballooned. Many of these internal processes were designed and implemented to satisfy internal rather than external requirements. Think about how many of your sign-off processes directly benefit the customer? Among the more noticeable changes following lockdown were rapid simplification of order processing workflow. In some cases, whole departments were removed from the process, in order to expedite delivery.
Our view is that the pendulum may have swung too far in some cases. In the medium term, some companies will reinstate slow manual processes. However, there is a massive opportunity to reimagine many business processes. To look at where human interventions can be reduced and optimised. For this to happen the first step is to visualise and map the process. There is a multitude of tools to assist with process mapping, our favourite is Studio Creatio. An easy to use business process designer which lets anyone in your organisation contribute and improve in process redesign.
Move fast
Speed will be essential. A review of processes that takes years and only results in a further backlog of development sprints will not drive recovery. There will be a significant benefit for organisations that move to smaller, faster change teams. In more practical terms, this may mean that the global corporate CRM platform is no longer “fit for purpose”! The biggest changes in CRM may be the shrinking of enterprise CRM usage. Smaller, more flexible, sales teams that are better structured to address the needs of customers locally are likely to be the winners. These teams, supported by a new generation of CRM platforms, will ensure that time is spent listening to and supporting customers – not feeding some corporate data lake.
Those concerned about pivoting from a centralised “one size fits all” CRM platform, to multiple businesses supporting CRM’s, may need to check how their customers view the trade-off.
