CRM and the IT Department

So just what role does IT have in a CRM initiative? In reality, it can be as little as “here’s what we’re buying, make it work” or as great as “go research and select an appropriate CRM software”. A lot of this has to do with the culture of the company. The goal is to involve IT appropriately without assigning them responsibility that belongs elsewhere.

IT is obviously going to have the typical IT responsibilities when it comes to rolling out CRM software. They have to make sure the company has the resources to handle the software (servers, user PC’s, internet connections, etc.). They need to be able to install and configure the software on the user systems. Those are givens, but what about some of the other project responsibilities?

Vendor/Software Selection: IT should definitely be part of this selection process, but should not be completely responsible for it. Why? Because while technical restrictions may help generate a short list of candidates, the winner should be selected based on usability, the fit the software has naturally to the company’s business processes, and an estimated return on investment. A developer-type person may be able to say this software is more easily customized than that one, but ultimately that translates into a Total Cost of Ownership issue, not a technical issue. Here’s another reason it shouldn’t be left up to IT – because they won’t be as much of a CRM stakeholder when the project is over as will sales, marketing and customer service. The people with the most to gain from the project and who will be using the software every day should be leading the selection process. You don’t want sales refusing to use the system because they “don’t like the software IT picked”.

Data Cleansing/Import: The department using the data needs to work closely with IT during this phase of the project. IT will have the technical skills required, but knowing whether information is valid or not may require someone who is familiar with the data. If importing responsibilities are left solely to technical people, you could end up with a very smooth transfer of junk right into your previously fresh, clean database, because the IT person understandably didn’t know the good from the bad. Example: IT is told to get all the salesperson Outlook Contacts and import them into the CRM system, and does so successfully, but didn’t recognize that a couple of the salespeople had vendors, competitors and personal contacts mixed in with their customer contacts. And one person had imported a now worthless 500-name lead list from a trade show into their Outlook contacts four years ago. Whoops.

Missing/Bad/Late Data Input: Invariably, in the early stages of CRM use, a manager will click a button to run The Report (you know the one, that report that played a huge part in justifying the CRM project, at least in this person’s mind?) and see information other than expected. It isn’t there, or it is wrong. So the irritated emails start flying, and it will be a miracle if IT isn’t on the wrong end of one of those. The software itself is the prime suspect. Of course it is IT’s responsibility to make sure it is working right, and so they are logically the first place to start asking questions. But even if the problem didn’t originate in the software, if there is a technical problem caused by a procedure not being followed, then there is a tendency to blame the software (and IT, by association) instead of the person who didn’t follow the procedure. IT staffers often say “The software is working ok – it’s just a ‘training’ issue.” Sometimes that means more training is needed, but other times it means more discipline is needed (there’s a compliance problem). IT can recommend a user follow a specific procedure to synchronize their system, input this data before that data, get more training or whatever, but only that user’s manager can really enforce it. Although IT may need to communicate proper procedures and report incidents of non-compliance, making that problem go away is up to the user and their manager (assuming everything that can be done has been done to make the procedure as mistake-proof as possible).

User Training: I believe CRM training is best performed by people who are experts in the user’s job, rather than by people who are experts in the software. That’s because the whole point of using CRM software is to enable people to do their jobs to perform business processes and reach objectives, not to understand all the in’s and out’s of what the software can do. If I’m a salesperson, I’d rather be trained by somebody who understands what I do every day and how the CRM software is best used to accomplish it, instead of by someone who doesn’t know anything about sales but can tell me the five different ways to create a Call record. IT usually isn’t the best choice here. Really, if it takes an IT person to teach the stuff, there’s a usability issue.

The Big Picture: Ultimately, the more a company treats CRM as software instead of strategy, the larger a role IT has. That’s the underlying problem. Since software can be such an important part of CRM, it is a natural tendency to put way too much responsibility on IT’s shoulders. Don’t fall into this trap. Keep non-technical issues out of IT and where they belong – with the owners of the CRM initiative.