Part II: Understanding the Importance of Redesigning Business Processes to Support Your Enterprise-Wide CRM

Effective business processes are specific, clear, and applicable.  Successful business processes are adopted and enforced.   The key to defining effective, successful business processes is to ensure the correct people are involved.

Who needs to be involved?

Involve the best people.  They are the key influencers and high performers in your organization who are recognized for excellence in managing relationships with customers.  Your business leaders will know who they are.   Work with the business leaders to nominate key participants and obtain approval for them to dedicate time to the business process design initiative.

Involve at least one representative from each business area that will use the CRM tool.  It is critical that the specific needs of each area of the organization are understood and considered.  Though standard processes should be identified, designed, and followed whenever possible, there may be instances where there is a genuine need for an exception to the process.  These should be few and far between.

Ensure that a good cross section of the organization is involved.  Having a good selection of varied experiences, tenure, and business area representation will ensure that any exception processes are identified and discussed.  This is a good opportunity for cross pollination of ideas across business units, encouraging each business unit to share recommendations and work together to agree on a process that meets the majority of the needs.

How do I ensure the processes are socialized and followed?

When the right business leaders are engaged, you set yourself up for success to gain buy in and adoption of the processes.  Use the business process design participants as champions of the processes within each of their own business areas.  Leverage the Organizational Change Management techniques of Sponsorship, Communication, and Training to introduce the redesigned processes to the organization.  Train the organization by showing how the CRM tool is used to execute the processes.  Making the training process focused will show the value of the CRM tool as well as reiterating the processes.

• Management Consulting
• CRM
• Credera
• Business Processes