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CRM: Planning for BI
by: Joe Roberts, Principal Consultant,
BECP, SLE, MCP
Far too many people look at a CRM system like a glorified
Contact Management tool. Often very little thought is given to structure,
configuration, and cleanliness of the data in the CRM system. This can be a lack
of planning or simply the result of an organic growth process. Whatever the
reason, incorporating CRM data into the data warehouse or monitoring and
measuring performance accurately becomes next impossible.
The inclusion of customer relationship data is a primary
focus these days in the world of Business Intelligence. Optimizing customer
retention and selling more to existing customers equates to higher revenue at a
lower cost. The ability to accurately measure and monitor these metrics can
radically increase the ROI of your Business Intelligence investment. To
accomplish this you must think globally when setting up or maintaining your CRM
system.
Consider carefully areas such as product hierarchies and
definitions, organizational structures (regions, departments, teams, etc.) and
customer detail information and the relationship of contacts to customer
records. The CRM system should be considered a SOR (system of record) not just a
“sandbox” for tracking leads and customer contacts.
Customer Records:
In this area it is important to be diligent. We often see
other systems such as the accounting system used as a SOR for customer records.
While this will work, consider the fact that nearly 90% of all customer contact
will be through the CRM system. The
ability to connect customer records in the CRM system to customer activity in
other systems such as accounting is critical. Without clean and accurate CRM
customer information this becomes impossible.
Products and Product
Hierarchies:
Often we are asked to tie sales activities such as customer
contacts, proposals, quotes, etc. to the actual invoice data and payment
information. In most cases a great deal of time and effort is put into the
consideration of product names and relationships for the purpose of invoicing
and accounting, but very little effort into matching this in the CRM system.
This makes this job nearly, if not entirely, impossible. Here again we would
prefer to see the CRM system as the SOR for this also. This is the source for
all other “downstream” linking of information.
Teams and Groups:
Most companies look at application security as simply a
requirement for the application. Here again, a global approach is always better
than a “local” approach. It is best when all your applications derive their
group or team structures from a central directory service like LDAP or Active
Directory. This is not always possible since many applications still do not
support these global technologies. In such cases you should work to duplicate
these structures locally using the global directory services as a template. Be
sure to use the same usernames and group names as much as possible. When
incorporating this data into the data warehouse you will want to be able to map
a single user through all of your systems.
Also consider how you remove or retire users. If you
routinely rename user accounts or delete users who are no longer with the
company; this can prove problematic for historical information. This is more
often an application issue more than a data warehouse issue but important just
the same.
In summary, you should consider your CRM system as a System
of Record for a good deal of your customer information and act accordingly.
Rules that you would apply to any SOR should be applied here. Set rules on how
and when new customers are created and strong rules on search for existing
customers and de-duplications. Understand and plan your products, product
hierarchies, teams or groups and membership. This leads to much better
operational reporting, analysis and dashboards in your Business Intelligence
platform. If your CRM is sloppy your BI will be non-existent.
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