How to write a CRM scope document

How to create a CRM scope document

Opsis

Into to me

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What is a CRM scope document?Inclusions and exclusions of the projectTwo different types

The CRM Scoping document is the document that describes what needs to be included and also what should be excluded from the CRM project.

Scoping a CRM project is essential if the project is to be successful. However, undertaking the scoping is often thought to be simple and quick task.

There are two parts to a scoping. Prior to selecting a technology the key requirements need to be identified so that the appropriate technology can be selected and the project not be compromised by the technology selection.

Once the technology is selected, a more detailed exercise should be undertaken so that the implementation of the selected technology can happen uneventfully. While, scoping can be straightforward, it does require the collation of a lot of information. This presentation aims to help you collect appropriate information.

Before we go into the detail of the scoping document Im going to review what CRM is.2

CRM comprisesManaging your communications with clients and prospectsControlling and building your sales pipelineEnabling reporting and business intelligence across many areas of your businessImproving your marketing and understanding of which parts of your marketing are delivering returns

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is an overarching philosophy and strategy of how your organisation interacts with your clients or customers. And of course, clients or customers may be known by many other names including members, partners, citizens, students, patients, tenants to mention but a few.

A successful CRM implementation can transform your business from where it is today, to where you want to take it, streaking ahead of your competitors.

CRM technologies are very wide ranging and they range from being very broad ranging to specific solutions for individual business areas.

CRM is a very comprehensive solution which is reaching the point of being essential for all businesses. It is significantly more than a database or contact management. CRM is to a database what a car is to engine. The engine is essential, but there is a lot more besides.

Over the next few minutes I will show you an overview of CRM to give you some food for thought. Your CRM project should be as large or as small as your business requires.3

CRM comprisesCommunication managementSales managementPost sales or service managementMarketing managementReportingAutomation of repetitive processes

The previous slide can be distilled to these six areasThere is overlap between these areas.Let us look at each of them in a little more detail.

Very few projects include all of these areas and one of the initial functions for the scoping exercise is to decide which of these areas will give most value to your business. This is rarely a single answer because of the overlap.

However, a CRM project is usually led with one of sales, marketing or service, each of which usually include some communication management, reporting and analytics and automation.4

CRM may include integration to a websitean ERP systema financial systema telephone or unified comms system

CRM is the hub of Customer information. However, many organisations have other systems which also require customer information.

Integration is simply the sharing of information between two or more systems. Avoiding data islands or silos is beneficial because you get the true all round of 360 view of the customer from one single source which also avoids people acting on different information, and it is timesaving.

Having the information in both systems can fundamentally be achieved in one of two waysRekeying the information which is inherently error prone and often bad for morale or linking the two systems together so that the information can be shared between them. Integration is the technical name for this linking. Integration can be done by a manual process of exporting information from one system and importing it into the other, or by some technical plumbing which transfers the information from one system to the other.

Although it is usually recommended to leave the implementation of integration to CRM until CRM itself is working for you, it is important to look at potential integration points during the scoping exercise. This is because the future integration may change how CRM itself is implemented.5

So how do you scope your CRM project?Identify why you are considering a CRM solution nowBrainstorm the areas of your business which are customer facingDetermine which of those areas would most benefit from CRM nowEstablish what the success indicators of the project are

The initial step of the scoping exercise is to understand the underlying drivers of the project.

During this early stage of the process it is also imperative to ensure that you have an internal driver of the project someone who believes in the value of the project, has the knowledge of the organisation and is able to liaise at many levels.

Here you should also have some idea of your budget. There are CRM systems that cost a few hundred dollars to buy, and others that cost several thousand dollars each year per user to rent. Then there is the implementation cost which can vary from nothing, if an absolute vanilla system meets your needs to millions if you need a lot of changes and integrations. There is little point spending time, effort and money on scoping out a project if you do not have the budget to implement it.

We establish the success indicators of the project at this stage because many projects once completed, or abandoned partially completed, are deemed to have failed. If we know our success criteria, we can work to those and ensure that we meet them. Success criteria should be measurable i.e. an improvement in sales is less effective as a success criteria than an increase in sales revenue of 15%. A project that has met all its success criteria cannot be called a failure.6

What to think about when scoping your projectWhich processes will be supported by CRMWhat reports do you need CRM to produceWhat data needs to be brought into CRMWhich teams or users will be the first to use CRM

What processes will be supported by CRMSome of the organisations that Ive worked with have really struggled with the idea of processes. Business Processes are simply the way that you do business. One of the many advantages of implementing CRM is that you get the opportunity to introduce standardised processes or to refine your existing processes so that your processes are supported by technology.

Reviewing the processes is essential so that you do not implement a broken process.

What reports you need CRM to produce for youIn many businesses especially smaller businesses, users are asked to produce reports about what they have done or achieved e.g. a sales report or a call list as an additional task. This has multiple disadvantages it takes time away from the users role and it often introduces a possibility of error because the report is separated from the actual activity. A well implemented CRM will enable you have your key reports in real time

Which teams or users will be the first to use CRM

What data needs to be brought into CRMData is a huge topic an sometimes becomes a project all on its own.

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What data should be brought into a new CRMCustomerProduct and Price list informationPrevious interactions e.g. orders or support incidentsCommunications

Data is usually customer and product. However, most organisations will also have information about their prospects and may also have lists of quotes or orders raised for prospects and often there are invoices for customers.

However, it is important to consider what information does already exist and where this is located. Customer information can usually be found in your accounting solution, however, this does not usually contain any prospect information. Prospect and sales data will typically scattered throughout Outlook and a miscellany of spread-sheets and other small databases.

Product data and price data may be found in an accounting system, or again in a variety of spread-sheets.

When considering how and when this should be brought in to CRM, there are a few things that must be considered. These are the current form that it is in, how it will be converted to match the structure that CRM will need it in, (which is often very different to the format of the current system, even if they are both in the same sort of database) how often does the data get updated (important because this affects when the data can be extracted from the legacy system) and how important is the data moving forward (important because decisions need to be taken about the value of data against the effort of bringing it in).

There is also always the option of just leaving the data where it is and having a process that requires the use of CRM and one or more other products to complete particular tasks. This should be considered and the benefits of having all the information moving forward in one place as well as the ease for the user compared to the effort of bringing in the data. Generally the migration effort is a single big, and perhaps painful effort for a few people, compared to an ongoing effort for many people. 8

Identifying the areas to benefit the most from CRMAreas with repetitive processesAreas where errors are occurringAreas where the reporting is difficult or inadequate

Repetitive processes can often be simplified, perhaps by a proposal template or by getting CRM to update itself rather than asking users to retype information The benefits of this are time saving (and hence money saving) as well as often morale improving.

Errors cost money, both in absolute terms of the cost to fix and in the more intangible terms of their effect on customer perception of your organisation.

If cannot measure it you cannot manage it. This is why reports that show you what is happening in your business are essential, and need to be part of the everyday process, not an additional activity.

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Benefits to sales from CRMVisibility of the sales pipeline in real timeAbility to share work to improve response time to customersVisibility of which opportunities are being lost and whyCapacity to reduce sales peoples workload by sharing data entry load across peopleOpportunity to implement a more rigorous sales process

Sales is often the areas that many people think of first when considering a CRM solution. It is the areas where most benefits can often be seen, because sales people are often operating very independently and many sales people dislike paperwork intensely.

However, creating a situation where the sales pipeline can be seen by everyone in real time and without any additional work and where sales people can focus on what they are best at i.e. relationship building and managing while other people look after the administration will reap dividends. Enabling sales people to see trends of opportunities both good and bad across the entire team or even organisation rather than just within their own funnel can also help them to avoid repeating mistakes or wasting time on no-hope opportunities.

Often sales people are very sceptical of a CRM solution, because they feel either that it will add to their administrative overhead or will allow management to spy on them. A successful project will show them the benefits to their job, i.e. more time in the field with less administration and more information provided to them for the same amount or less data entry and so will win them over. The key to winning over sales people is to speak to the whats in it for me. A converted sales person can often be the biggest advocate of the entire solution.10

Benefits to Marketing from CRMVisibility of which lead sources are the most profitableAbility to easily track which campaigns are delivering the best returnOpportunity to track campaigns against budgetThe ability to dovetail sales to marketing

Everyone has heard the old adage I know that half of my marketing budget is wasted, but I do not know which half. This happens because marketing traditionally has been difficult to track. Adverts were placed, exhibition stands rented, brochures printed. Organisations received leads and made sales, but it was difficult to know the source of those leads. This meant that it was impossible to learn which campaigns and lead sources should be increased and which should be stopped. A well implemented CRM that has focussed on its marketing processes and requirements can avoid this.

Marketing has frequently been berated by sales for not providing a suitable stream of leads or prospects. By creating processes where stages can be introduced so leads are only passed to sales when they meet certain criteria means that sales will only receive prospects who have worked through the earlier stages and so are already part way down the sales funnel. This means that marketing is elevated in sales eyes.

Leads can be nurtured by marketing to them until they are sales ready. Maintaining communication with prospects until they are ready to buy is a skill much better left with marketing than sales, but doing it will increase the sales return of the entire organisation. 11

Benefits to post sales management from CRMOpportunity to control who is given assistance and whenVisibility of which products are producing the most service issuesAbility to put the answers to your commonly asked questions into a knowledge base

Post sales is also known as service.

Many organisations lose money because they are obliged to assist clients and prospects who are not entitled to the service, or worse have identified that a particular vendor is useful for supplying information but from whom they have no intention of purchasing. Others lose money because a client has overrun their entitlement. But implementing a more rigorous process to identify who should be getting service enables the focus to be given to the good clients and prospects. CRM can also facilitate a process to give some, lower cost assistance to people who do not qualify for the full service.

Being able to identify which products are generating the most problems enables decisions to be made either about whether these products should be stocked or provided, or about their design.

A knowledge base can be used either to enable more people to help customers, or to enable customers to help themselves via a self help web site. The knowledge base itself can often be built by collecting the information that your technical experts already have and are supplying to your clients.12

Benefits from the communication management in CRMAbility to see all communication between your organisation and a client Opportunity to implement escalation procedures if due dates are missedTasks can be passed between team membersInformation can be readily shared as needed without internal emailOpportunity to standardise communicationsAbility to reduce time to produce documents

The value of being able to readily check what communications have occurred between a particular client and your team is huge, and is an area where time is wasted in many businesses. It is also an area that generates scepticism because of a feeling that people will check up on others. However the value of a being able to see communications immediately prior to a meeting can save a reputation.

An effective CRM solution should also remove the necessity to copy team members on emails or to have shared email boxes. This also reduces the quantity of email that each person has to manage. In place of this flooding of email, each user is given the ability to proactively pull the correspondence that they require when they need it i.e. pushing of information is replaced by the pulling of information.

Escalation when someone misses a key deadline is part of most businesses. However, if that escalation is dependant on a user remembering and asking for assistance or passing a task over, it is unlikely to be effective. CRM gives you the ability to write rules and then CRM itself ensures that these rules are acted upon correctly.

Jobs can be shared so that people can do what they do best. Because document production can be largely automated this task can be removed from people who are more productive elsewhere. Shared email can be replaced by queues which can be monitored by teams, so responding becomes more streamlined.

Frequently used communications can be turned into templates and then these shared throughout the organisation as required. CRM will combine the standard template with data from the CRM database and the same data entry can feed into reporting across many instances of that document and other activities. These templates will both standardise the resulting documents and reduce the time taken to produce them.

Where appropriate the documents can be produced at the point where they are required, eg printed at a remote printer to save postage and time.

Multiple teams not located together can work together on problems with access to appropriate info in real time.13

Reporting in CRMReports will summarise what is happening by customer, by product or by userReports can show your business graphicallyDashboards can give you a quick overview of key parameters

CRM gives you the ability to see what is happening in your business in real time and without your people having to generate reports in addition to their usual work

A report may also be used to produce client facing documentation. However, this can be decided when the implementation is being discussed by the technical team who will do the implementation.

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Automation in CRMAutomation can speed up your business and improve customer service by increasing reliability

Many businesses have areas where they are overworked or overstretched. What is the cost of an additional staff member? What would happen if this cost was instead invested in removing repetitive tasks by getting the technology to complete them for you? Technology also does exactly what it is told to do when it is told to do it. It also does not leave for a pay rise or a better opportunity or absorb HR resources.

Automation removes several areas of possible human error includingTyping errorsForgetting tasks or informationInability to do a required task.15

Examples of automation in CRMAutomatically sending out responses to emailsAlerting someone when something does (or does not) happen (within a timeframe)Updating the database

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Documenting the scopingList all your customer facing processesPrioritise these

It is usual to implement a few processes or a single team or department first to get some quick wins and then move onto some more.

Once you have listed and prioritised your processes you are in a position to work out if your implementation should be done as a single phase or multiple phases. It is usually better to do multiple phases so get some quick wins and willdevelop some internal ambassadors to the project.

Any integration that you require between other systems e.g. your website or a financial system is usually better left until a later phase so that CRM is largely sorted out. This is for a number of reasonsCRM is usually the master of this shared information, because most customer information is needed in CRM before it can be used by the systems typically integrated to CRM - the exception to this rule is a lead capturing website which usually lacks the structure of CRM and so is still seen as the master.minor changes to CRM can be much more problematic if an integration is already completed. 17

Documenting the scopingProcess flows including any time requirementsA detailed description of any reports requiredA detailed description of the data requiredA list of the users (by role) involved

The original way of documenting your requirements is a series of documentsA requirements document produced by you the clientA functional specification usually produced by a Business Analyst (who should have a good knowledge of the product of function to be implemented and your business and who may or may not be part of your organisation) in conjunction with you and against which you will sign offA technical specification which is used to implement the solution

Doing your own scoping document is becoming much more common and may save you time and money, but the information that is needed to successfully implement the solution still needs to be collected. However, working with someone who both understands your business and knows the product is essential, or you will end up with a requirements document that states the obvious and falls short of the level of detail required. I have seen many examples of self-prepared scoping document where the ability to captures customer addresses is listed. This is obviously important for all businesses, however with pretty much any CRM it would be more expensive to exclude than to include. However this same document author will not include the reports, thinking that that they are standard.

Often especially working with modern products such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, these documents can be reduced into one document because the tools and techniques used for the configuration are must more visual than previously, so the number of translation steps can be reduced. This is very much the trend as projects are now conducted more as

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Other aspects of the scoping documentOther hardware requirementsAny requirements for, or opinions you have about, keeping IT in house or outsourcing it to the cloudTestingThe geographical locations of your staffTraining requirementsDates that affect the project

The aspects of the project mentioned here are simply standard project management, but surprisingly they are often overlooked. HardwareIs your current hardware adequate for the new solution this includes servers if you are considering an on-premise solution and desktops / laptops and perhaps mobile phones for both on-premise and cloud solutionsOn premise or CloudThis is a big decision and will have an impact on the product that you select. Many CRM solutions are only available as one or the other there maybe similar solutions, but they are not identical.TestingA commonly made mistake is to test the standard or out of the box functionality but to not test customisations, or to not use your data. It is also important to test both the mainstream and the exception of processes. Testing should not be misunderstood. Time has to be allowed to do this thoroughly. And when problems are found, retesting needs to be done after the problem is fixed. There are several different types of testing, and different people are required for each (including unit testing, done by the developers are the produce their configuration; user acceptance testing, to ensure that the solution meets the requirements; system testing, to ensure that the entire system is working as expected and at an appropriate speed).Training requirementsTraining should be conducted so that each user gets the training that they deserve and as close to the go live for them as possible (and no more than a fortnight before go live). This is key to maintaining their morale.Gaining the support of your users so that they will use the new technology is imperative if the solution is to be successful. Training is one of the ways to ensure that this does happen.Training is also required for the testers especially for user acceptance testing testers prior to the testing.Dates that affect the projectThe financial year end and perhaps quarter end if this creates additional workload for team members or usersAny leave, especially longer blocks of leave, that any key people have booked, or leave booked by people which will put additional work onto their team members, be this normal work or work from the CRM project.Availability of certain resourcesThe required due date.Delivery dates of any new hardware or other requirements of the project.

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In conclusionCRM is significantly more than Contact Management or a database

CRM is to contact management like a Rolls Royce is to a bike. If a bike meets your needs then that is what you should buy, but dont buy a bike and expect it perform like a Rolls Royce.

CRM can includeContact managementCommunication managementSalesMarketingPost Sales or ServiceReportingAnalyticsAutomationIntegration to other systems that also contain or require customer informationWhile it is unlikely that your project will comprise all of these, it is important that they are not ruled out through ignorance

If you are able to generate a document that gives all of the necessary information you will be able to implement your selected CRM without too many surprises whether you use internal staff or and external consulting company such as Opsis or a mixture.20

Who are Opsis

CRM Specialist Business Consultancy based in Sydney AustraliaMicrosoft Partner with the CRM competencyWorking with Microsoft CRM since 2002 and with CRM since 1997

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For further assistance on your CRM scoping project please contact us onPhone +61 2 8212 3480Email opsisinfo@opsis.com.au

This can be from a 2 day to a 2 week session spread over time.22