Well, yesterday was Telus’s presentation of Microsoft CRM. MS CRM is essentially a mid-market (not enterprise and not SME) Customer Relationship Management (CRM) package. Others in the field include Goldmine.
We are essentially looking at this as one of the options to replace our current business application system.
So, yesterday was half presentation and half user discussion. The few things that caught my eye, for us (since our current system actually does it’s job quite well) are:
1. Ability to delegate tasks and responsibilities through the organization. Similar to email, really, but within a single workspace.
2. CTI (Computer Telephony Integration). Basically when someone calls their phone number is identified and you can do a variety of things with that (pull up record, pull up potential record, modify record, etc).
This is useful for us mainly because we know our phone records are inherently IN-accurate. This would be almost like kicking off a change management process.
The issue with MS CRM, as with any third-party application, is that it will fundamentally change our process. Of course Telus will send in a Business Process Engineer to understand what we do, talk through what we do with individual user groups and suggest improvements to them.
It’s not that they will necessarily redefine our process, but that our process has to change because of the way the system is now.
And because it has to change, users will be upset no matter how high their level of buy-in.
Ultimately we will be choosing between a tool which emulates what we do now and makes the current people’s jobs easier (while solving our issues) and a tool which takes a bigger picture view and makes peoples jobs easier for the future.
It might seem like an easy choice, but it isn’t really. From a business standpoint ’sacrifice the few for the good of the many’ makes sense. But it doesn’t when I realise that there is in fact a culture here. A fragile culture. One which I really don’t have the right to mess with.