Most businesses invest in CRM to increase their bottom-line performance, which justifies the investment.
This seems like a pretty hard-edged intention, far from the fluffier one of nurturing genuine human relationships and contacts between your people and your clients.
The sort of relationships that make you drive miles to a restaurant because Bob is such a great guy, even if the food isn’t all that special.
Return on Investment seems to fit more easily with creating an efficient machine that replicates the perfect Customer Journey every time—one that can be monitored and analysed in neat graphs. A great model might be the fast-food restaurant beloved by Michael Gerber in the EMyth, where the customer experience ends the same way each time with “Have a nice day.”
But how far would you drive to eat at a fast food restaurant, or would you just stop at the next one you see on the road? How loyal are you to a business that makes you feel like someone is going through their processes compared to one where you know the people by name? Which do you trust more?
That’s why I believe CRM is not about creating the same perfect client journey each time but about connecting people in all their richness. The software is just a tool that makes that easier, and we need to put Human Beings at the heart of CRM and the way we deploy CRM Systems.
In this article, I introduce the 4D.CRM approach to CRM implementations and upgrades. The 4D comes from the Appreciative Inquiry model (you can find a lot of material on Youtube) and stands for Discover, Dream, Design, and Destiny. I connect these to the Human Beings that need to be brought into the center of your implementation.
Discover your skills and experience
Human Characteristic: Strength in Community
The CRM you plan to implement will impact people across your organisation, and it will be much wider than you may think. It is important that you understand the skills, experiences, and strengths of this “Community.”
These people often don’t know what these qualities are in each other, so one way of appreciating this is to listen to their stories.
These stories come from the questions we ask each other, which are important because they set the direction for your CRM implementation. From these questions, you can Appreciate a positive core of strengths that you can leverage for the CRM implementation because it reflects the community that will determine whether it is successful.
Dreams and Visions
Human Characteristic: Imagination Vision
Einstein once said, “Logic will take you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere.” Arthur Ward put it another way: If you can imagine it, you can achieve it, implying that if you can’t, you can’t.
That is why the ancients imagined the animals they would hunt in the morning, and black girls don’t achieve what they should.
If your stakeholder community can visualise themselves in the future that you hope the CRM implementation will deliver, there is a better chance that it will succeed. If they can also imagine themselves in that world, look back to where they are today, and see the challenges that they overcame, you can build an insightful road map that will take them there.
It’s insightful because it identifies challenges across the business and enables you to manage risks. It is also insightful because it comes from the people who know—the people who will be impacted.
Design a plan
Human Characteristic: Tool Making
As I mentioned above, Humans are not physically impressive or well-adapted to their environment. Their success is due to their ability to collaborate and share knowledge.
One of the areas in which they collaborate and share knowledge is the tools that they use.
A tool is defined not by what it is but by what it does. A screwdriver is a hammer when it is used to bang a nail in; it is just not very efficient. An accounting system is a CRM if it is used to manage client relationships; it is just not very good.
Tools and imagination define what can be done. Taking these two together means that tools evolve within the environment in which they find themselves. They need to be adapted to by the people who use them and adapt to the environment that these people inhabit (mentally and physically). That means they are best developed in small steps, one building on the success of the other.
That is why the best design for your project is not to create a fixed specification for some end point but to develop a series of Agile steps that are absorbed by the people and their environment (mental and physical).
Destiny not Destination
Human Characteristic: Adaptability
Human Beings aren’t particularly well adapted to any specific environment. Many animals are far better adapted, but most have gone extinct because their environments changed, and they didn’t.
Human beings are not well adapted, and BECAUSE of that, they are very ADAPT_ABLE.
The environment I talked about above is constantly changing. The more perfectly aligned your CRM is with this environment, the more likely it is to be out of date by the time it is delivered. The longer it is before you update it, the more outdated it will likely be.
So, the best CRM is about more than managing a perfect machine for the current environment; it is about empowering people’s adaptability to address an uncertain and changing future.
That is a uniquely human quality, and that is why your CRM needs to be fully Human-Centred. It also means there is no Destination, only a Destiny where new environments (mental and physical) require new tools. The best CRMs are designed to make this easy.
About the Author
I have been implementing CRM Systems for the last 15 years, and while I have the skills, I have never been fascinated by technology. I have always been far more interested in People and their relationships.
Perhaps that’s because I am a Psychology graduate and studied Social Philosophy at the postgraduate level. Maybe that’s also why I have always been passionate about Client Relationships and have held Directorship positions.
