What can CRM Give You For Christmas?

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   By Chris Bucholtz, CRM Blogger

   
   

   This is the time of year when stories about CRM and Christmas suddenly make their appearance across the CRM media landscape. They come and then disappear faster than a freak California snow. My favorite headline among them is still “Ho-ho-hold on to Your Customers,” which a former editor of mine came up with. These stories generally have the same tone – is your CRM strategy ready for Christmas? I think that’s kind a weak premise; CRM, if it’s worth anything at all, ought to be able to scale and to handle a seasonal burst of customer data. Besides, this is probably not the ideal time to make a major change to your CRM solution; your plans should have been made months ago, and good luck getting your IT guys to cancel their vacation time if you haven’t yet.

   
   

   The holidays are a terrific time to assess how effective your plans have proven to be, though, especially if you’re in a B2C business. You’re going to get a big set of test data, and it’s going to uncover issues that your business can remedy for the coming year. Think of it as CRM’s gift to you.

   
   

   If you’re in charge of your organization’s CRM solution, this is the time of year to have a big white board handy, and markers with plenty of ink. There’s no better time to look for problems – especially recurrent problems – and note them. This process should include lots of talking – to sales, to marketing, to the service side – and a lot of note-taking. Even the best  CRM  solution can have its constituents and customers evolve out from under it, and getting an idea of how their aligning or misaligning with your CRM strategy at Christmas can give you your marching orders for January.

   
   

   Periods of stress (and anyone who ever worked retail can tell you that the holidays fit into this category) result in what I like to call “accelerated revelation” – the true colors of things tend to be uncovered much more quickly than usual. A process that your service team has been working around all year will become more painful as service volume increases. A bit of data your sales team has been doing without is going to become key to a deal. A great marketing idea for the holidays will be short-circuited by some minor bit of data that you failed to collect. These things happen, but if you stay on top of what happens in December 2009 you can make sure you don’t suffer from them in 2010.

   
   

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