How we run CRM

Last week we deployed Dynamics for Marketing into our Microsoft Dynamics environment, we are using it to manage events at this stage but there is intent to expand its usage once we have a good handle on that part of the product and move into email and social. That’s really just the tip of the iceberg on our CRM program which has been going for a number of years now, one which I am proud to be a part of and something that I believe has a good story behind it.

A few years ago NZTE we had an on premise CRM that had around 350 entities (for the deep CRM people out there you will now that’s a lot). We aren’t a highly complex organisation but we do operate in about 50 locations around the world so the number of entities as well as the fact that it was on premise didn’t make much sense. We had to go back to the drawing board.

To do this we assembled a small team (5 people - 2 technical, 3 non-technical) to get the bottom of how we had got to here on our CRM solution and they spent about 6 weeks locked in a room to come up with our CRM roadmap. This wasn’t an easy exercise, it involved digging really deeply into what our people were after, developing personas, understanding the art of the possible and addressing the core reason we had a CRM in the first place. 

The last point, the reason we had a CRM was instrumental in keeping our waka travelling straight over the next couple of years, it was something we could refer back to and assess our features against and help guide the decision making of the team. Anyone embarking on a CRM program should have one of these, it seems obvious in hindsight but this is the first time in my career its been so clearly articulated.

Critically, CRM was never a project at NZTE but rather a program of continuous delivery where we designed, tested, developed, improved and researched the right way to optimise our operations and this meant sometimes we didn’t use CRM at all. A CRM needs to adapt to changing customer needs (how much has changed recently?!) so the need to be nimble and make quick decisions is critical. An example of when we had a problem that didn’t fit our core purpose was when we developed a grants solution (this used to make our CRM all murky and complicated) but we stripped it out and delivered it on its own and then integrated the customer record. PowerBI has also been a revelation for us (we started with the standard 6 charts in dynamics – yuk) and now have a plethora of reporting and dashboards that tell us the areas that our customers need focus. 

That’s the tech though, the people are the real secret sauce behind most CRMs – the way that we support our CRM program is with a product owner (we call them a business lead), a technical specialist (problem analysis and development), and then leadership. It’s a small team but highly effective in delivering the outcomes we need. In addition to this it can also be about how and why you use the CRM, to do this we support our users with a continual training program that starts from their first week with us and gives them hits of training every 6 months after that.

After we had our core CRM program on track we looked to expand into Finance and Operations for our back office which our finance team use to run their processes (another on prem migration effort). We still iterate the finance solution but not as much, things just aren’t as dynamic in that area (excuse the pun).

The most recent goal has been to bring our customer information direct to our customers when we developed our customer portal - myNZTE https://my.nzte.govt.nz/ This is where we see a lot of our future program heading, speeding up how we interact with customers. We are experimenting with the sales insights product to see if that adds value here but suspect that some combination of mobility and artificial intelligence will take us to the next level. Personally, doing AI seems like cloud was 5 years ago, if you aren’t doing it then you are going to get left behind so investment in this area is an important focus for us. 

In addition to that we will continue to iterate our solutions as our customer needs change, staying flexible gives us the best chance of getting the NZ export economy into high growth over the coming years. 

Sometimes it’s good to look down the maunga. Only then can you appreciate how far you have come, if you want to be part of climbing the next one have a look at this role we have going at the moment. CRM Dynamics Specialist