In our last blog, we discussed the concept of a CRM centre of excellence (or ‘CoE’). In today’s blog, we’re focusing on the best practices you should follow to maintain and even enhance the effectiveness of your CoE.
Many companies implement a CRM platform and step back, taking comfort from the thought that their job is done. But that’s not the case. After all, you wouldn’t launch a business and then just leave it, would you? As your business grows, your processes will evolve and customers will begin to expect different things from you. Your CRM platform is the enabler to not only make these changes seamlessly but also unlock future growth.
If implemented properly, a CRM centre of excellence will ensure your business gets the very best from your CRM platform. However, in order to reach their full potential, CoE’s need the right people, the right technology and the right processes in place. Luckily for you, Team Trigg pulled together 8 things you can do that will help you to grow and scale an effective centre of excellence. The diagram below shows a summary of each best practice covered in this blog.
PEOPLE
Define Roles & Responsibilities
The success of any project rests largely on the shoulders of those behind it. After all, if no one understands what they are responsible for, how can they ensure they achieve what they’re supposed to achieve? Setting clear roles, responsibilities and goals for every person in the CoE (and every supporting person around it) will help your team to stay on task and reach those project goals.
Communicate Effectively
The phrase “you can never over-communicate” is true for any team, but especially so when it comes to a CoE. Depending on the size, structure and purpose, a CoE can be incredibly complex and involve lots of stakeholders. Thus, putting in the effort to ensure communication is frequent, clear and concise is key. The number one cause of CoE failures is a lack of engagement from other business units, so maintaining relevant and timely communication across all areas of your business is absolutely vital.
When implementing your CoE, engage all key stakeholders early and designate “leads” from each area of your business to distil and cascade information from your CoE to their business unit and vice versa.
Find out more about the different roles within a CoE (and how they should communicate) in our previous blog.
PROCESS
Ensure The CoE Aligns With Your Business Structure
There are two main CoE strategies: centralized and decentralized. These are defined as follows:
Which strategy works best for you will depend on many factors (some of which are explored in our previous blog on CoE’s). However, we find that the best indicator of your ideal CoE strategy is whether or not your business units or markets all use your CRM platform in the same way. If so, a centralized structure would suit your organisation. However, if your teams have very different needs and uses for the platform, and/or if they use different platforms from one another, it might be worth considering a decentralized approach to allow each line of business to manage CRM according to its requirements.
Set Your Objectives (and make them SMART)
You can’t measure the success of your CoE (or the projects your CoE carries out) if you don’t first set clearly defined goals and objectives.
Before you implement your CoE and/or before starting each new project, ensure you set clear objectives (using the SMART goal concept) that detail what you aim to achieve and how you will measure it. This way, you can look back at the end of the project (or after a pre-determined timeframe) and establish whether or not it was a success, helping you to make informed decisions about your next project.
Start Small
Don’t try to dive in with a bells-and-whistles solution. Start by defining a minimum viable product (or ‘MVP’) for your centre of excellence. This should be a scaled-back solution driven by the company strategy focused on he objectives or key business problems you need to address immediately.
Create a list of the objectives you’d like your CoE to achieve and organise them in order of priority, then highlight the benefit of achieving each objective. This will provide essential evidence to back up your strategy if required.
Once your MVP is up-and-running, you can look at optimising your CoE to achieve some of the less urgent objectives on your list.
Manage change effectively with Guidelines To Update Your CRM Platform Deliberately and Efficiently
Most CRM platforms are highly configurable, which can be both incredibly effective and challenging for your organisation. While admins and managers can customize the way their teams operate on a platform, this freedom can also lead to inconsistencies (and inefficiencies) if they are not thinking about the end-end user journey, how marketing hands off to the sales team, sales to the finance team and so on.
A well-run COE will follow specific processes and guidelines for deploying updates to its CRM. While every COE’s process is different, they should all include some form of these three stages:
No-one likes change, we can make the transition smooth by sticking to a clear process that ensures your COE is only making changes that are meaningful and beneficial to the platform’s users. Having guidelines in place for how this should be done also ensures that you’re maintaining the platform in a consistent and efficient way.
Track Your COE Performance For Constant Improvement
So, you already set your objectives, initiated your CoE MVP and created guidelines for any future updates. Now you need to look back and see whether or not you achieved those objectives you made earlier.
It’s important to determine a timeframe at which you will review your CoE’s performance against your objectives, then carry out detailed reporting once that time is up (for example, through a quarterly business review). This will be an opportunity to review your project spend vs. budget and whether or not you stuck to your original timelines. At this point, you can also review your objectives, move the goalposts and/or set new ones. Your COE’s goals may shift over time, and that’s expected. Those new goals will reveal further opportunities for improvement.
TECHNOLOGY
Stay Informed about the Latest Platform Innovations
Just like any system, all CRM platforms are regularly updated and improved by their developers. If your CoE is to increase the ROI of your CRM activity (as is its core objective), you’ll need to be aware of these updates – ideally before they even happen. Some updates are requirements and could impact ways of working for platform users, whilst others are new features that might increase productivity, efficiency or user-friendliness. It’s important to know which is which and how your business can best adapt to these changes.
Here at Trigg, we specialise in implementing and improving the use of Salesforce. So, let’s take Salesforce as an example here.
Three times a year, Salesforce launches new capabilities and features to improve its platform. These are detailed in ‘release notes’. It’s critical that your COE regularly reviews these release notes to determine what must be updated which new features (if any) to activate. Even if every update isn’t relevant to your business, your COE’s leaders should be familiar with what changed and what improvements are possible.
Perhaps more importantly, if you decide to activate a new feature, your Salesforce Architects should review any custom solutions to make sure they won’t break any existing features or workflows.
Every time Salesforce publishes a new set of release notes, we post the highlights and key points here on our blog and on social media. Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date.
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How Trigg Digital Can Help
Whatever your objectives or your strategy, or if you haven’t worked out either yet, the team at Trigg Digital know what it takes to design a strategy led by your business objectives and establish a CoE that is a resounding success. After all, we’ve implemented quite a few in our time!
To find out more about how we can help you and your CoE (or lack of!), get in touch on +44 203 239 8492 or at hello@triggdigital.com.
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