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Starting the CRM Process.
As I've mentioned before, my firm is about to re-implement a CRM application. The plan at this point is to have a very limited and highly focused implementation, based in our Marketing and Business Development departments and open to a few exclusive partners and practice groups who actively market their practices. I promised that I'd blog this process from beginning to end, so here we go.
Background
To be brutally truthful, our initial CRM application implementation failed miserably. The project was driven entirely from the IS Department; although Marketing had initially requested the application, IS took over both the technical and the cultural aspects of the project. For future reference, this is ALWAYS a no-no. We implemented an application that would have required a significant change in the work-processes of the attorneys, not to mention the culture shift required before lawyers trained in the 'eat what you kill' philosophy of law would embrace (heck, I'd have settled for grudgingly accept) a technology that encouraged (err, allowed) them to share information. This is a common problem with CRM implementations in law firms and I won't expand on it here. I'll simply add that we ran into every possibly objection to sharing information imaginable.
We stopped distributing the application to new users here over a year ago. However, early in 2002, our Marketing Department started to really feel the need for a centralized application to manage their data, currently housed in various Excel spreadsheets, home-grown databases, and Word documents. At their request, I prepared a proposal geared towards re-implementing the application strictly from a Marketing perspective, and we stand on the brink of beginning that process today.
Starting the process
In order to avoid the pitfalls we experienced earlier, I have scheduled a meeting with all of the personnel from Marketing and Business Development. I have asked the group a series of questions about their expectations and hopes related to the implementation (see below). The vendor recently released a new version of the application, though, and before I can expect to get informed answers from the group I feel obligated to show them the tool they will be using. This meeting is intended to provide such a demonstration, and thankfully my sales rep has agreed to conduct this "internal sales" presentation for me. She will be gearing her presentation specifically to my target audience and focusing on the application's functionality in those departments.
As I mentioned, I have a series of questions for the personnel who will be using this application. These are designed to move "ownership" of the CRM process from the I.S. Department (read: me) to the users themselves. In short, I've asked them to think about these issues:
- Who is going to drive this project?
- Why do you want to use this application? to what end? What will be your ideal end result of this implementation?
- Who is going to lead this project from your department?
- How many people will be using the application?
- Who is going to be responsible for ongoing data integrity?
I have a lot of fantastic ideas for this group and how they can use the application to facilitate their daily and long term goals to benefit the firm. I'll occasionally post an update here, but I'm excited to be starting this project again. Turning data into useful and quickly accessible information is what I love to do. This will be a challenging project, but I'm looking forward to it.
Final Note re: the technical details
For those of you who may be wondering, we'll be using Interface Software's InterAction 5.0 application for this project. Our initial implemention used multiple sites and servers (one for each office) and we've decided to absolutely NOT go that route this time around. Replicating the data between the servers was never a problem, specifically, but lawyers are mobile beings, and moving their accounts from one office to another when they (invariably) switched offices was not a fun task. We ran into the same sort of issues with moving users between sites in Exchange (loss of single instance storage, among other buggy sorts of things) but with a CRM application those issues are multipled; loss of the equivalent of single-instance storage is simply not an option. Thankfully, we only ran into this a few times because of our failed initial implementation, but I am emphatically NOT interested in going down that path again. Live and learn, I suppose.
And, for FULL disclosure (and just to plug his blog, though he doesn't really need it) I should mention that Rick Klau is with Interface, makers of our CRM tool. This will not affect my blogging of this process, as the software is simply the tool the departments will use to implement their CRM goals, and it really is a great tool. Be assured that when I say really REALLY great things about the application, it is emphatically NOT because I need a new t-shirt or something. :)
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© Copyright 2003 Jennifer Klyse.
Last update: 12/8/2003; 10:34:54 PM.
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