CRM etiquette

When I hear “CRM,” my eyes glaze over. Customer relationship management sounds sterile and complex. It sounds like a system that’s going to put a heavy burden on my staff to implement and support.

I need to be more open-minded. CRM is really nothing more than etiquette, where one party is not you, but your company, codified in software.

Etiquette? Mais, oui! Etiquette is a set of rules and behaviors defining how people can get along well together in society. No man is an island–and that’s even more true for businesses. CRM merely implements the policies, procedures, and processes that keep your business and its customers on friendly terms.

Notice that what matters here is not the software–it’s the process. You already have customer relationship management practices in place. Your first step should be to examine them closely. What works? What could be improved? What do your customers think is missing?

Do you need to turn those practices into a formal CRM system? To answer that, you have to calculate the costs you’ll incur when you implement a system and the return you expect from it. Part of those costs will be inevitable changes in some of your business processes. Bear in mind you’ll probably be hiring new people to staff the systems, and giving new responsibilities to current employees.

You can try to build your own CRM system in-house, but it’s a lot of work. I suggest you buy a package or service instead. By buying the software, you get the benefit of the experience your vendor has had with every company it’s worked with. You simply can’t learn those lessons yourself in any reasonable period of time.

And CRM is a system you want to be sure to do right, because it’s very visible. It’s your company’s interface with your customers, and if you alienate your customers, you’re going to hear about it. That also means it’s important to have broad support for your CRM project at the senior management level, because you’re going to need the cooperation of many individuals within the organization to successfully implement the technology.

Perhaps most critical to the project’s success is an experienced project manager. CRM systems can be among the most complex systems running within an IT organization. It’s important to have someone who’s experienced at managing multiple resources across diverse departments in charge of making it work.

Got your CRM system successfully deployed? Congratulations, but you’re not done. You can’t just install a CRM system and forget it. You have to measure its effectiveness and be prepared to maintain and enhance it as you learn what it can and can’t do, and how that meshes with what your customers need.

Don’t expect to see immediate changes for the better when your system goes live. The Gartner Group says you can expect it to take up to two years to overcome the cultural factors that hinder CRM success. Do expect to see progress during that time, however.

CRM is a tool of tremendous potential importance for an organization. I’m interested in hearing any lessons learned by organizations that have made it work.

A process for management success

Lately I’ve been hearing from a lot of sources that in order to succeed, you have to get your processes in place. You can have all the financial resources you need, just the right people, even a vision of where you’re going and what steps you need to take to get there, but if you don’t have processes to travel that road, you’ll never reach the end.

It’s apparent how determining and documenting processes can help with your business. The same idea applies equally well to your career. In a way, your career is your own personal product, and you need to manage it just as you manage in business.

My career has been on my mind a lot lately, for several reasons. First, we just launched a new Careers resource center on ZDNet. Here you’ll find career management tools; job postings for IT careers; features and columns on managing, career advancement, and issues in the IT job market; salary surveys; helpful downloads; and research resources. If you haven’t visited yet, check it out–I think you’ll want to bookmark it.

At the same time, I just got word this week that a former dot-com employer of mine laid off its entire editorial staff. I feel awful for my former colleagues, who I know worked hard to make the company a success. At the same time, I feel lucky that I made a good career move in time to save myself from the unemployment line.

Finally, I’ve been sitting in on a corporate training session that all managers at CNET Networks (of which ZDNet has been a part since October) undergo. The class, called Symphony, is conducted by The Real Learning Company, and uses the metaphor of a symphony orchestra to teach attendees how to be better managers.

I recommend management training like this for any organization. Too often, managers gain their positions because they’re good at some job in the line of business, which they know well, but find managing their former colleagues new and daunting. Managers who know how to manage make for happier, more productive employees.

What if you don’t have the budget to train all your managers? I’m going to sum up part of what I learned in a few paragraphs. I don’t have room for the entire course, but with this as a seed, you may be able to cultivate some better practices.

The first step to better management is to set goals and expectations. They spring from your company goals. (You do have them, right? Written, distributed, and familiar to all?) Goals should be SMART–specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and time-bound.

Make sure there’s a feedback process in place, so managers can communicate goals and results, and employees can make their voices heard. Regular performance appraisals and monetary and non-monetary recognition are part of this process.

Gather all the resources you need to be effective. Resources include people, tools, and systems. At the same time, try to remove any barriers you can identify that might impede your group’s performance.

Training your team members is a key to success, especially when they don’t have all the skills they need when they join your team. Learning on the job may be the most effective training, but it’s not the fastest or best in every situation. Consider formal classes and informal coaching or mentoring.

Make sure you have the right people in the right jobs. Sometimes you can bring in new members based on their skills and your needs. More often, you have a team in place already, so you have to effectively select the job assignments to match the skills, ability, and temperament of your employees.

Finally, when you’ve done everything else, you have to make sure your team has motivation. Unfortunately for you, motivation comes from within, and it’s hard to instill in someone. You need to find ways to get your employees to feel a strong affiliation with the team and your company. Some ways to do that are to listen to each member and to recognize their accomplishments and those of the group.

My best managers have always led by example, and I try to follow that path. I try to foster two-way communication and practice the values I respect in those who manage me. Go thou and do likewise.

Get ready for component servers

One of the trends I caught up with at last week’s Gartner Symposium was a move away from general-purpose servers, which have become something of a commodity. Intel has made it easy for vendors to turn out standard, high-volume servers at attractive prices. Yet while these general-purpose servers are designed to perform a range of tasks, they are masters of none.

However, new special-purpose servers are springing up to fill new niches in the network ecosystem. These devices are designed from the ground up for one specific role, which might be to server up Web pages, video streams, or secure content, or to act as a back-end database engine, among other purposes. In these roles, they become, in effect, components in the network infrastructure.

Expect this trend to continue. Why? Because it no longer makes sense to centralize all your computing power on a few machines.

Component servers are even cheaper than their general-purpose brethren. Because their roles are limited, there’s less that can go wrong with them, which balances out their greater numbers in the ease-of-management equation. And component servers can’t be a potentially expensive single point of failure. If one dies, it’s fairly easy and cheap to swap in an entire replacement.

How do you buy component servers? Specify in your RFP the characteristics you want, in terms of data rates, scalability, and service profiles. Let the vendors show you how they can meet your needs.

As you plan for future server purchases, bear in mind that while many of your servers today are constrained by bandwidth limitations, more organizations are rolling out faster network pipes. At the same time, more rich media content (audio and video) is making its way out of many organizations. Thus, it’s becoming more important to use top-end CPUs in servers, to include fast disk subsystems, and to implement sensible caching.

Plan now to roll out the right server for any given niche–one that reduces the time it takes for data to make its way in and out of your organization.

Extra: With all you have on your plate, you may have missed this milestone: the first successful implementation of RFC 1149, a.k.a. Internet Protocol over avian carriers. Researchers in Bergen, Norway, got ping reply times ranging from 3,211 to 6,389 seconds (that is, when the pigeons carrying the packets didn’t go astray). Don’t try this in your computer room.