Conceptualizing the CRM Design from Business Requirements

How does Covid-19 plays a role in CRM? Obviously those companies with successful digital transformation have less pains with the current lock-down than those who are not ready or not prepared to embrace digital transformation yet. I explain this in chapter 4 and 5 of my book ("The Art of CRM").

The illustration above is to showcase the 7 ingredients of digital transformation that needs to be considered (if not implemented) in your CRM design or redesign of your CRM. With this you’re able to build a solution that provides a customer experience in today’s business world and ready for tomorrow’s challenges.

Most of these technologies are available only in the cloud, you may not be in the cloud yet, or? The first step in your design is to adopt an “interface” with the cloud one way or other, for your today’s business or have it ready for tomorrow. Is digital transformaiton really expensive? no, it is NOT if there is an interface ready to connect with the cloud services. These are services that are offered in the cloud by the so-called pay as you go method. This is something that is easy to do and will be necessary for businesses today and tomorrow. Customers are highly influenced by the Internet and mobile applications that they use every day. They want better service and digital experiences in every interaction and across all channels. Companies are working smarter than ever before in order to gain the confidence, trust and personal relationship with their customers.

So the first question is always where do I start with the design?

Obviously you start with your business requirements, build up the cost-value-matrix, explained in my book “The Art of CRM”, visualize the priorities for your business and start with those of high business value and low cost of implementation, that is a simple exercise, do you agree?

The Solution Architect, together with your business analysts will apply analytical skills and experience in project implementations to compile the list of business requirements and score the priority of each business use-case along with its cost of implementation after conducting the fit-gap workshops.

This is often based on the list of use-cases with priorities that are scored by business stakeholders and users from participating in business workshops. You have identified each item and assigned the ID numbers for later use, if not you may want to do so, both in the Cost-Value matrix as well as in the Solution-Blueprint you will refer to these ID numbers, for example in the processes catalog, which we cover later in this chapter.

You could set a cost range as well as value to the business from 1 to 100 and compile the table as we’ve done here below:

Now it is pretty easy exercise to set out a roadmap for your CRM implementation, start to conceptualize your design from the business requirements, obviously start with those use-cases with lowest cost of implementation but highest value for your business (top-left quadrant), skipp or delay the implementation of those processes with highest implementation costs but lowest value to your business (bottom-right quadrant).

There is no better time for CRM projects than now during the business slow down and the Covid-19 related lock-downs, there are many good reasons for that, but the number one is that your internal resources may have more time now, your business pain-points and priorities are changed and your vendors may have better ideas for you. I believe there is a lot to learn from the current covid-19 crisis and I am optimistic we will build a sustainable future across the world, and we are at the begining of the 5th industrial revolution.

You can purchase the book on Amazon .com https://lnkd.in/dk9GxjG , Amazon .de, or directly from the publisher https://www.packtpub.com/business/art-crm

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