Is your Customer Relations Management (CRM) giving you the results you expect.

Customer relations management is often regarded as an area of some skepticism by the rest of a management team. Production Management for example deals with the hard facts: so many machine hours, so many man hours, so many raw materials, so much final product, so much waste and so many rejects. Each of these items are tangible, measurable and, if properly planned and checked, controllable.

It is the same with the financial management of the company; so many $ Sales. $ received, 30day receivables 60 days receivables, so much paid out, so much due to be paid, gross profit and so on. It is not by any manner of means alleged that these things are all easy, but everything can be measured in concrete terms.

Now let us consider Customer Relations Management (CRM). Instead of the manager controlling all the inputs it is in fact each customer who has the keys. Sure you can have the representatives who call on the clients, each call can be measured as can each order received. But it is the customer who may or may not decide to place that order.

There are sales targets which have very often been set by the executive management with little regard to input from the sales reps themselves and scant, if any, regard to the prevailing economic conditions. Thus the sales rep either gets congratulations, or hauled over the carpet, for figures that have little to do with him except that he made a call and collected an order which meant that he made, or missed the targets.

But if the management text books are to be believed there is actually an awful lot that can be planned, controlled and measured to remove some of the randomness and so give greater assurance of success. Mostly it is about managing the process, about seeing that the motions are carried through and constantly reviewing progress against plan.

In order to do this it means that the whole range of staff who deal with customers need to be aware of what they have to do, they then have to do it and the results have to be measured. All this smacks of a system. And so it is. Before the explosion of computers and the internet a lot of this was managed by charts on the wall and someone responsible for updating these charts. The sad thing is these manual information systems often fell into disuse because the updates were inaccurate, or late, or laborious, or because no one really checked them.

Then came the Computer revolution and one of the results is that there are many CRM software packages on the market. If properly applied the job of CRM management becomes far more straightforward.

But to use them properly means that a great deal of CRM training must take place. Quality Integrity provide their customers with CRM training and CRM support for all of the top 10 CRM packages on the market. With the skills they impart, to the entire range of staff that interface with customers, a lot of the Voodoo associated with the old fashioned Sales management is removed.