Chapter 16: Crossing the Chasm - What Will You Need to Change?: Eight Steps to CMR Success

Overview

Chances are you already have in place a CRM initiative of some dimension. If you’ve gotten this far, you passed the test in Chapter 13 and are ready to implement CMR. To do that, what must change? What can you keep, and what will you have to throw away? How do you make the transition?

Just about everyone in the business offers steps to successful customer intelligence systems, and the steps are almost always about the same. With CMR you’ll find similar steps for improving customer service, retaining customers, increasing the lifetime value, and treating different customers differently, but they will require going further. Here are the eight steps for successful CMR:

1. Think differently

2. Establish a benchmark

3. Define measurable goals and objectives

4. Create the strategy

5. Reengineer the processes

6. Get ready for change

7. Keep technology in its place

8. Select the right tools

Step 1: Think Differently

The first, and perhaps the most difficult, concept to cast overboard is that the benefits of your CMR efforts would accrue to the company, not to the customer. Most CRM programs are driven by the desire of the company to improve the efficiency of the business process and reduce cost while increasing sales. In many cases, the inward focus on company benefits ignores or avoids required changes within the company, not realizing that, for all the firm’s talk about customer centricity, the customer can still have a less than delightful experience and receive less than expected value from the relationship.

In most CRM practices companies are not asking customers what they need, what they want, or what bothers them. As you transition to the CMR philosophy, you will have to ask customers these question to find out which processes matter to them and what you can change to make their lives easier.

For example, the telecom industry claims to recognize the value of implementing CRM applications and has been investing huge sums in infrastructure and related applications to build customer relationships. But one look at their sky-high churn rate shows that customer service is still not a core competency. They have failed to learn what the customer cares about most. The biggest complaint customers have about their relationship with their telecom providers is inaccurate billing. But most telecom’s customer databases are not integrated, and many billing systems are based on old and outdated applications.^{[1 ]}This goes back to the basic tenet that in many cases, business processes themselves must change to enable a company to practice CMR to its advantage.

For CMR we have to get down to the basics, and that simply means what the customer wants. Failure to adapt to customers’ needs can be costly such as a mortgage company that turned away high-value mortgage applications because it was not geared to deal with customers whose needs were outside the norm; or a telecom company whose in-bound call center left sales enquiry call-backs until quiet periods that never came, leading to a three-month buildup of potential business worth six figures.

Step 2: Establish a Benchmark

You usually set your benchmark by determining how many customers your company currently has, defining the current usage of your products and services, and evaluating your existing customer intelligence infrastructure that helps you to serve these customers. This step always leads to the question, “How do I capture more of them?”

Establishing the benchmark for a CMR initiative involves determining the best potential customers for your business and learning what it means to have them manage a relationship that is rewarding for them and profitable for your company. Only after establishing these requirements is it time to set your benchmark based on how many of these customers your company currently has and the degree to which you are making their lives easier.

The benchmark process also includes a thorough study of current processes and costs, so that cost/benefit comparisons can be made in the future. (More about this in Chapter 17.) Balance is needed to meet both the requirements of the customer and the requirements of the company. CMR must also deliver value to the shareholders and stakeholders by turning customers into assets.

Step 3: Define Measurable Goals and Objectives

Most advice in this area suggests that pitching senior management on cost savings is a much easier sell than talking about revenue increases, which is why the benefits of most CRM initiatives are structured to accrue to the company and not the customer. The truth is, the things you should measure to turn customers into assets are economic, not operational. Ultimately increased revenue and customer equity are two of the greatest long-term values of CMR, and profit should still be the number one goal.

ROI Metrics It is necessary to establish new ROI metrics to measure the success of your CMR activities and to know how they are effecting the customer base. These new metrics must be established in the setting of goals and objectives. It is important right at the start to find agreement on what will constitute success and to set the parameters for measurement. Metrics and financial analysis are concrete and will always win over vision and possibilities.

A serious weakness of too many of the old CRM programs has been the failure to consider the issue of metrics a top priority. Adrian Payne, professor of services and relationship marketing at Cranfield School of Management in the U.K., says, “Our research shows that only a small percentage of people have done proper measurement of acquisition and retention economics, and therefore have a view about what the lifetime value of a customer is—and so how much to invest and where to invest resources.”^[2]

CMR can be an expensive exercise, especially if a company cannot define what it wants to accomplish with the initiative and measure progress against that objective. Yet, only one-third of companies in a recent survey could provide any estimate of their expected return on CRM investments.^[3] A big part of defining your goals is defining what should be measured and planning measurement as a repeated exercise to prove you are turning customers into assets.

There are various schools of thought about what to measure. Some opt for measure of increased lifetime value. Others look for increased sales, increased margin, or greater retention of customers. When a company is able to define the metrics for return on its CMR investment, the process is straightforward.

One Seklemian/Newell retail client set as their objective an increase in sales from a targeted group of customers. They created a test that would measure the ROI for implementing CMR. Customers in the third decile of spending represented the segment most likely to grow, so they selected a random sampling of these customers for a CMR pilot. From the same decile, they selected a control group that perfectly matched the target group in spending habits and demographics. They implemented a carefully planned progression of personalized services—a private toll free number, free coffee during visits to the store, advance notice of store events, and surprise gifts—for the CMR test customers and continued their traditional target marketing offers for the control group.

At the end of twelve months they found a 14 percent increase in sales from the CMR group versus a 2 percent increase in sales from the control group. After converting the sales dollar increase to margin dollars and subtracting the difference in marketing costs between their CRM efforts and their target marketing efforts for the control group, they showed a return in margin dollars seven times the additional cost of CMR. Based on this success, they rolled out the pilot to all stores and began to test efforts to upgrade customers from even lower levels of spending.

Call Center Metrics Looking at call center metrics is only going to confuse the issue. Bermuda’s 1-800-BERMUDA call center, profiled in Chapter 3, could never have been transformed into a customer-oriented service center if the call center manager had to defend the relationship-building investment on the basis of shorter calls and reduced contact center costs.

When setting goals and objectives for your call center, it is simply not enough to set service level performance standards based on calls per hour. As Brad Cleveland of Call Center Magazine points out, “You can achieve a service level objective while also creating waste, extra work and low quality even though your agents: misunderstand customer requests; enter data incorrectly; relay the wrong information to callers; make callers mad; miss opportunities to capture valuable feedback; and unnecessarily cause repeat calls. Average call time cannot measure whether the callers and your organization achieved the call’s purpose.”^[4]

Economic Metrics To deliver value to the shareholders and stakeholders by turning customers into more valuable assets, even with a CMR initiative, many of the old CRM economic metrics that measure the movement of customers into assets still apply:

• Average order size will increase as you make it easier for customers to find more of the things they need on your website, or gain access to their sales rep on their terms.

• Campaign response will improve as your offerings become more relevant to your customers’ needs.

• Cross-selling and up-selling during sales and service interactions will prosper as your customers give you more and more information about their needs and interests.

• Customer profitability will improve as your new knowledge earns a greater share of each customer’s wallet and you are able to migrate customers from mid to high activity levels.

• Customer retention and customer lifetime value, the strongest measures of your customers as corporate assets, will increase as you strengthen the bond between your company and your customers.

But CMR demands some new metrics. That starts with the measurement of the strength of your customer dialog and the quality of the information gained. We have always said no contact at all from a customer can be a defection warning signal. Now we must say that if the share of communications initiated by the customer is not growing, you are not making CMR work. If your customers are not finding it easier to communicate with you and get the information they need, you are not empowering them to manage the relationship.

Much of this is moving from product measures to customer measures that involve the breadth, depth, and length of the customer’s relationship with you, and some of these new metrics must go beyond the economic and measure the emotional connection of the relationship. This emotional loyalty cannot be measured simply through retention figures; it must be found by examining what motivates and retains a company’s loyal customers.

Jim Barnes, author of Secrets of Customer Relationship Management (McGraw-Hill Trade, 2000), says, “A relationship involves emotions. We need to understand the emotional connection. We need to ask why, and get at the true customer viewpoint. Beyond functional loyalty lives emotional loyalty, and this should be the goal.”^[5]

Step 4: Create the Strategy

In the “Eight Building Blocks of CRM,” Gartner talks about strategy: “A CRM strategy is not an implementation plan or road map. A real CRM strategy takes the direction and financial goals of the business strategy and sets out how the enterprise is going to build customer loyalty. The objectives of a CRM strategy are to target, acquire, develop and retain valuable customers to achieve corporate goals.”^[6]

The objectives are the same for CMR but the business strategy itself must change. CMR is not a snap-on tool. It is not a technology that can be purchased. Taking existing methodologies and management processes and applying them to CMR will create an initiative that addresses the wrong issues.

A CMR strategy must develop a seamless integration of every area of the business that touches the customer through the integration of people, processes, and technology. Truly empowering the customer is new and uncharted territory for most businesses.

To be successful, your strategy will require well-developed, integrated programs that will facilitate relationship building. This will raise new questions such as how to deliver new empowerment to your customers, and how to deal with the many new ways to reach customers and for customers to reach you. Your strategy must provide for new training for all personnel to understand where the company is going and to understand the new objective.

One element of this relationship building is allowing your customers to choose the communication channel they prefer and training all personnel to respect the customer’s choice. As hard as it may be to believe, I still see many marketing executives defending their personal kingdoms at the expense of the customer and the company—executives responsible for e-commerce at brick and mortar companies actually discouraging customers from shopping in the company’s stores.

Beyond that, strategy must include providing the right tools and developing guidelines to ensure that the entire workforce can use the CMR tools effectively. The right tools are not always the most expensive ones. Business writer David Simms quotes Doug McRae, president of Vancouver-based Governor Consulting, Inc., “Ask the people who really do the work what tools they need to really do the work. A lot of executives who make the dollar decisions get drunk on the toys. They see this weird and wonderful stuff and don’t understand the pain and frustration it takes to get there—they go from nothing to exotic technology without any middle steps.” Simms has a great way of expressing this. “Plucking a soccer mom out of her hunter green minivan and sticking her in a Formula One race car doesn’t qualify her as a Formula One Driver.”^[7]

Finally, the strategy must take into account how all these new efforts will create increased profits and shareholder value. If CMR strategy is not closely aligned with the company’s profitable growth objectives, failure is certain.

Step 5: Reengineer the Processes

It’s one thing to talk about the reengineering of processes to move from the goal of improving efficiencies and reducing costs to the goal of transferring power to the customer, and quite another to make it happen within the enterprise. All companies have cultures, whether they know it or not, and embedded culture is resistant to change. It leads to the old argument against change, “We’ve always done it this way.”

Internal Culture In talking about this challenge I use the old story of the woman who always cut off the end of a ham before putting it in the roasting pan. When her husband asked her why she did that, she told him her mother always did it when she cooked a ham. Finally the husband had an opportunity to ask his mother-in-law why she did it. The mother-in-law’s answer was “My roasting pan was too small.”

I have now found another good story to explain the creation of a group culture.

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs underneath it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb toward the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the other monkeys with cold water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result: all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when a monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, and then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been done around here.^[8]

The point is that with anything new you can expect resistance. Some will resist because they have always done it another way and others will be too concerned with protecting their own territory to appreciate the new corporate goals. We must respect tradition but we should also respect the words of Somerset Maugham: “Tradition is a guide, not a jailer.”

Internal CMR The reengineering will require an internal CMR approach. For external CMR ask your customers to take the lead in telling you how you can help them manage the relationship. For internal CMR, enlist associates at all levels into the reengineering process, bringing front- and back-office staff in early. This will allow employees to learn about the project from first-hand involvement while, at the same time, giving you a valuable understanding of the things required for your team members to perform their jobs. Involved personnel will be more inclined to work hard to make the project succeed. If employees are not involved in the design and development, and if they don’t believe they are a driving force behind the project, it won’t be successful. People always run more enthusiastically on a track they helped to design and build.

My friend Barton Goldenburg, president and founder of ISM, a leading CRM consultancy, tells a story about a large publishing organization that integrated three companies under a new umbrella. Its vice president of sales realized the new conglomerate needed a common perspective on its customers. Recognizing that users would ultimately drive the success of the project, he brought together fourteen people within the company to form a super user group—those who would be most affected by the new program.

Comprised of salespeople, managers, and representatives from editorial and distribution, the team held brainstorming sessions and came up with a list of business functions that would benefit the entire company. Then a survey went out to all customer-facing personnel asking them to prioritize the list. Based on that response, the user group and management reached an agreement on which functions would be implemented in which phase of their project. Carefully chosen super users became ambassadors for the project. They were excited about the initiative and shared their enthusiasm with coworkers throughout the process. They lit a fire inside the company.

Sandra Gudat, president and CEO of CRM consulting agency Customer Communications Group, stresses that buy-in comes from a healthy mix of motivation, education, tools, and training, and its importance should not be underestimated. She advises,

Assemble a change-management team, an enthusiastic group of leaders, handpicked to represent every department in the company. The team’s mission is to identify how each department will be affected by the new initiatives, create action plans for implementing those initiatives, and communicate the message to others in their individual departments. This process will also help the team identify some ways to get ‘quick wins’—small victories that will help prove to skeptics that the new business strategy really does have legs. These steps give employees a measure of control and ownership, and help the team leader tailor the company’s plan to meet departmental goals.^[9]

Gudat lists these questions employees will need answered:

• How is each division, department, and employee affected?

• What new skills will they need to learn?

• What will their daily tasks look like?

• What are they doing today that will support this new-world vision?

• How will their efforts be measured?

• What will change, both initially and as the program takes shape?

• What are the things that won’t change?^[10]

She then suggests, once you have answered these key questions, to commit it all to paper in a manual or training guide as a way to foster a common understanding and cohesive mission.

It appears this kind of collaboration is taking root in U.S. companies. An Information Week 2002 research survey of 100 business technology professionals shows 84 percent of companies are in the process of improving collaborative practices with employees. Fifty-nine percent of respondents also said that they expect collaborative initiatives with employees to increase within the next twelve months. Supporting the caveat that change will not be easy to accomplish, one in three responding to the survey said they are grappling with developing a comprehensive collaboration strategy and they are finding resistance to change by employees.^[11]

Employee Empowerment It is important to remember that experienced employees, as well as customers, are the company’s most valuable assets. Employees should be treated as valued assets just as customers should be. Companies don’t always treat employees that way. When one company established a telecommuting program to allow some employees to work from home, they learned they had to set realistic goals and expectations for teleworkers and managers, and establish a regular and frequent schedule for communication. They ended up realizing that they didn’t even have that in place for any of their other workers.

This is what reengineering the process means. You can’t ex- pect employees to work effectively without a process of regular and frequent communication. It doesn’t matter whether they telecommute or work side by side, they can’t collaborate if they can’t communicate, and good communication may require some new processes.

Jonathan Copulsky, partner in the CRM practice of Deloitte Consulting, says his firm’s research and client experience point to a strong correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction and, in turn, between employee loyalty and customer loyalty. He says,

Companies appearing on the lists of the most popular places to work are those that not only clearly communicate expectations to employees, but also link reward systems to how well workers measure up to those expectations. Companies with loyal employees also excel at helping workers understand how their performance against expectations contributes to shareholder value and, ultimately, to the company’s future.^[12]

Copulsky stresses that top companies do a number of concrete things to reinforce both worker and customer loyalty. The best, he says, communicate ways in which expectations can be carried out with specific behaviors. He gives the example of Ritz-Carlton, which not only tells employees precisely when they should look customers in the eye and greet them, but has also set up some ground rules to help their employees. The Ritz-Carlton credo lists twenty “basics.” Two relate directly to the hotel’s emphasis on empowering staff to provide genuine care and comfort to guests: Number 8 is that any employee who receives a customer complaint, “owns” the complaint; and number 9 is that instant guest pacification will be ensured by all. React quickly to correct the problem immediately. Follow up with a telephone call within twenty minutes to verify the problem has been resolved to the customer’s satisfaction. Do everything you possibly can never to lose a guest.

Three basic tenets support these rules:

• Move heaven and earth to satisfy a customer.

• Every employee has spending authority of $2,000 to solve a customer’s need.

• Everyone has the authority to call in a coworker for help.

Every day, all members of the staff have a “daily quality line-up meeting” with their boss and discuss one of the twenty basics. Perhaps this is why the JD Powers survey shows 94 percent of Ritz- Carlton customers are satisfied, when the closest competitor can only achieve a 57 percent satisfaction rating.^[13]

Other hospitality chains seem to be following the Ritz-Carlton example. Recently, through a miscommunication at the front desk, I had to wait at the Lexington, Kentucky, airport forty-five minutes for the Hyatt Regency van to pick me up. When I complained to the driver, he was quick to call the front desk on his cell phone and tell them to upgrade me to a suite to make up for the inconvenience. Just a few minutes after I had arrived in the suite, the driver appeared at my door with certificates for complimentary breakfasts during my two-day stay—a wonderful example of employee empowerment.

The thought that value assets can be created by a mutually beneficial exchange between the firm and its employees suggests a move from employee relationship management (ERM) to relationships managed by employees (EMR). Empowered employees, just like empowered customers, will find their own incentives to contribute and receive value from your business system.

Step 6: Get Ready for Change

As we move from customer relationship management to turning the power over to customers to manage the relationship, a lot of things will have to change. Trying to let customers manage the relationship means no longer using your customer information to see what products or services you can push to customers. You will be using this information to learn what products and services customers want. This will require changes in the management of the customer knowledge base. All that most companies required for their CRM activities was transaction processing. Producing segmentations from a multimillion-name customer file is essentially a batch process dependent only on processing power. CMR activities demand the total integration of customer information gathered from all interactions and delivered with speed and precision. That will require more than horsepower. The IT team will have to find new ways to manage the customer data and facilitate the sharing process on an enterprise-wide basis. All of those in any way involved with customer contact will want their customer information complete and easily accessible, and they will want it now!

Step 7: Keep Technology in Its Place

As mentioned in Chapter 2, too many guidelines for CRM start with technology. Technology applications are essential enablers for your CMR strategy, but the technology must be secondary. Too many CRM initiatives have failed because of one of two technology issues. The first one is what some have called automated chaos—leaping into automation of existing business practices. Determining the business functions to automate should be a simple step, but automating a flawed business process leads to disaster. In A Paradigm Shift for Customer Care, Marion Howard-Healy says, “A poor process that is automated remains just that—a poor process.”^{[14 ]}Rule one is get the CMR business process right before trying to absorb the technology, and then don’t try to automate too many things at once. Jerry Sparger, Global Business Solutions, Inc., makes this case solidly in his “Eight Steps to Success:”

Companies often try to roll out new business processes and technology all at the same time. This can create more work for the employees, with less benefit. We have seen cases where employees just did their job the old way, while keeping separate information to satisfy the new way. This is extra work, and often not effective. You should gradually implement processes and technology, either by time phasing the implementation, or by implementing small isolated groups. This will keep users involved and motivated, yet minimize the shock to your organization.^[15]

Rule two is don’t allow your new CMR program to be seen as an IT project. Enlist associates at all levels into the reengineering process. When developing new customer-centric programs employees at all levels will wonder what is happening, why the program is needed, and what it will mean to them individually. When they see it as a technology project they lose interest quickly, sometimes even sabotaging the program. They need to see it as a customer service project heralding a fundamental change in the quality of customer interaction leading to deeper relationships, designed to make customer interactions more effective, better for the customer and more profitable for the company. Beth Eisenfeld, research director, Gartner, confirms this second rule with two case studies:

• BMC Software made two failed attempts at implementing a CRM system. The first time the IT department took the lead. Lack of adoption killed this first effort. Only 50 percent of end users (employees) began using the system at all, with use dropping to 30 percent after a few months. Two years later, the IT management software firm tried again with the IT group in charge. The team did not perform an analysis of user work flows; instead, the group made assumptions. Once again, the end users resisted. The company’s third try stressed executive sponsorship and involvement of the people who were going to use the system. Business processes were well documented and the project team included members from all stakeholder groups. This concentration on change management and user involvement resulted in a 97 percent usage rate.

• AMF Bowling’s CRM implementation failed on its first two tries. These attempts also failed because of lack of involvement of end users. A company spokesperson said, “Typically, what happened was that the IT department would come up with a sales application and go to the sales team and say, ‘This is what you’ve got, and now you’ve got to use it.’” On the third try, the company involved the sales force in every stage of the project and held a review every two weeks. When the application was rolled out they chose a salesperson to make the presentation at the annual sales conference. The final implementation made it to the Aberdeen Group’s top ten CRM projects for 2001, which is based on a product’s ability to achieve measurable ROI and meet its business objectives.

Eisenfeld suggests the primary lesson learned by both BMC and AMF is “Be certain to involve all stakeholders—including customers and end users—from the project’s outset.”^[16] In other words, CMR needs to be thought of as a new way of doing business rather than an IT project. And that must be made clear at the very start to everyone involved.

Step 8: Select the Right Tools

Understanding, developing, and nurturing customer relationships require a strong flow of information across the enterprise. Having the right information at the right time and enabling effective interaction across all channels is critical for CMR. The selection of the right tools becomes more specialized.

My good friend, Bernice Grossman, president of database marketing company DMRS Group, has been advising both B-to-B and B-to-C marketers on their database marketing, integration systems, and CRM projects since 1983. She has lead companies through the process of finding just the right technology vendors for their integration needs and gives this advice:

Examine your needs first, not the technology. It’s easy to get swept up by information on hot new technologies and vendors; however, your starting point for the Request for Proposal (RFP) process should be your own company’s needs. You must be able to detail the following basics before beginning to examine solutions:

• What you really want to be able to solve and/or do using the solution

• How you expect it will solve or do it (e.g., functionality of the solution)

• How it will interface with all the various users and uses in your organization, including how different departments will interface with the solution

• How (if at all) customers and prospects will interface with it.^[17]

A caveat for CMR: There are dozens of technology providers offering CRM solutions these days. Few, if any, have had the experience of managing customer interactions based on the proposition that the customer should have the power. You will have to be very specific about things (like the new measurements discussed above in Step 3) to be sure the prospective supplier’s tool can actually deliver your needs.

Many software solutions are capable of measuring campaign expense reduction and incremental sales. Metrics, like the strength of your customer dialog and the quality of the information you are gaining from the customer, will require new algorithms. Moving from product measures to customer measures will mean creating new definitions of success. Grossman advises against an RFP with a simple check-off column where potential vendors can say whether they comply or not. She says, “It’s useless. It doesn’t mean anything!” She compares a check-off box to asking people if they dance. “If they say yes,” Grossman says, “how much do you really know about their ability? Instead, you should ask that vendors provide either a software screenshot or a very detailed explanation to support every single answer they give you so you are sure they really can provide the tech you require.”^[18]

CRM represents an entirely new way of looking at the profitability of the organization, and therefore of looking at customers, marketing, information, and strategy. It starts with new thinking, new questions, new evaluations of customers, and new metrics. It requires a new business strategy, reengineered processes, and appropriate tools. As these eight steps show, CRM will require a lot of changes. Just don’t try to make them all at once.

^{[1 ]} “Why Some Sectors Are Stymied by CRM,” E-Commerce Times, January 10, 2002, p. 4.

^[2]Adrian Payne, “British Telecom Survey: CRM at the Crossroads,” crmcommunity.com, March 7, 2001, p. 2.

^[3]Francis A. Buttle, “Is It Worth It? ROI on CRM,” CRM-Forum, May 7, 2002, p. 4.

^[4]Brad Cleveland, “Rethinking Service Level and Quality,” Call Center Magazine, April 2002, p. 66.

^[5]James G. Barnes, Secrets of Customer Relationship Management: It’s All About How You Make Them Feel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), Chapter 5.

^[6]John Radcliffe, “Eight Building Blocks of CRM: A Framework for Success,” gartner.com, January 10, 2002, p. 2.

^[7]David Simms, “More with Less: Counting CRM Calories,” crmguru.com, September 16, 2002, pp. 2, 3.

^[8]Anonymous.

^[9]Sandra Gudat, “What Makes CRM Work?” The DMA Interactive, April 4, 2002, p. 2.

^[10]Ibid.

^[11]Jennifer Zaino, “Employee Collaboration on the Upswing,” information_week.com, February 11, 2002, p. 88.

^[12]Lou Hirsh, “The Inside Story on Customer Loyalty,” ecommercetimes.com, April 8, 2002, pp. 1–3.

^[13] “Customer Focused Empowerment Pays at Ritz-Carlton,” serviceexcellence_.com, April 10, 2002, pp. 2–5.

^{[14 ]}Marion Howard-Healy, “CRM to CMR—A Paradigm Shift for Customer Care,” quoted in Richard Forsyth, “Deliver the Benefits from CRM by Putting the C into CRM—Part 1,” CRM-Forum, March 4, 2002, p. 1.

^[15]Jerry Sparger, “Eight Steps to a Successful CRM Project,” crmcommunity_.com, July 11, 2001, p. 4.

^[16]Kimberly Hill, “CPR for CRM,” E-Commerce Times, March 26, 2002, p. 1–3.

^[17] “Your CRM/eCRM Data Integration Project,” Relationship Marketing Report (reprinted from marketingsherpa.com, Volume IV, Issue XI, 2001), pp. 1, 2.

^[18]Ibid., p. 9.