Organisational Buy In
By aligning CRM with your corporate strategy you are one step closer to getting organisational buy-in. However, to follow good practice you will need senior management buy-in, and a senior management stakeholder or champion. Without a senior management stakeholder you will fail to get support from individuals and eventually fail to get the resource and commitment required to make CRM successful at your institution. It is essential that you achieve support from senior management at an early stage. Many institutions follow a project management methodology and develop both a project group and a steering group. You will need to ensure that you enlist the right senior management people on your steering group, who can make decisions on behalf of the institution and can bring influence across the board. JISC have developed a useful leaflet which is a briefing for senior management on managing customers, this may help in getting organsiational buy in.
To get senior management support you need to be clear about the benefits that CRM can bring to your institution. You can find some of the benefits here, however, you should always be realistic about when these benefits will be achieved. Institution wide cooperation begins with the BCE/CRM strategy and the operational realisation of what is involved in CRM practices.
It is important to understand that Change Management will have an important part to play in buy in from your organisation.
"If its not in the CRM system then it doesn't exist." - University of Hertfordshire
This approach means that CRM is made a core focus for both data collection and the processes to support BCE. It also enabled integration to other systems.
Individual Buy In
Effective and accessible reporting is the biggest ‘hook’ to gain buy-in to the system itself. Many colleagues will reap benefits from being able to gain access to reports from the system. Alternatives should be considered,such as how people will access the data and who should be given access. Examples may include:
- Inclusion in institutional data mining regimes
- Inclusion of CRMS data in wider research, for example sector analysis
- Separate internal reports site, including reports from all systems
- Central reports service to support the development of business processes, accessible from within the system itself
- Ability of each user to produce filtered lists and print/export
These options are not mutually exclusive.
Good Practice Example
Day-to-day system users require support and training to create the reports necessary to replace the information they previously used to manage their client tracking systems, and the service tailored, depending upon their skills levels. Resourcing the reports service and support should be factored into the ongoing costs of the system.
The University created Purple Door as a single point of contact for the business community. Its job is to help external organisations get through to the correct department and to ensure that they are given access to the widest range of services the University can offer. As part of that, a CRM system was purchased, however, it was not readily utilised by people who had existing relationships with clients as they did not see any value in engaging. A group of people was employed to carry out customer related business generation and they started using the CRM. Three years later, they started to say it was unstructured and still represented only a small fraction of the business engagement being undertaken. That’s where Peter’s job came in, to encourage further use of the CRM across the institution and to develop data structures.
In the institution, different people were using varied methods to engage with the CRM. To begin with, the University had 20 users spread across one support and one academic department but this improved and they now have approximately 60 users spread across fifteen departments. This breakthrough means they now have champions in these departments who are utilising the CRM effectively and promoting it to colleagues.
The University previously found it difficult to get people’s buy-in and found that they had more success convincing people to use the CRM system by negotiating a one-month trial during which they could demonstrate the positive benefits (or value) that it would present them. This allowed them to retrieve reports and identify potential synergies, whilst securing their data and linking them to other areas and departments. Adopting this approach meant a manageable group of people could meet regularly to discuss best practices for CRM in the hope of making it more efficient and an overall success.
Peter Hooley, Data Executive, Portsmouth University
