Getting a Grip on CRM

Reid Kilburn, vice-president of CRM, says Innovapost has peopleworking with groups such as sales and marketing to help them identifyCRM needs. These initiatives generally come from the client, based ontheir strategic plans, their operating plans and their marketingplans, he says. Innovapost helps the client refine these requirementsand then develop the initiative through a phased approval process.

Communicate, communicate, communicate!

Involving representatives from throughout the business is only part ofthe solution; its also important to communicate with the rank and fileabout what is happening.

Once BMO Financial had established the over-all objectives of itscustomer value management program, Erschen says, the second thing thatwe talked about was change management and making sure we dideverything possible to communicate and deploy the change effectively.I would say for everything weve done, thats the area where wevelearned the most.

According to Dave Pritchard, informing CreoScitex employees about thechanges CRM would bring proved to be quite challenging. I dont thinkwe did a very good job of that because we had some quite tight timeand budget goals.I think we underestimated the amount of change that was happening andwhat it would take to communicate with people, he says.