Letter from Chairman

Written by Chris Read, Chairman of CRM specialist Dunstan Thomas

Many in the financial services sector have recognised that they need to change to serve their customers better or risk losing them. The structural changes hastened by depolarisation are forcing many of us to re-examine what we do and ask ourselves how we want to serve the market going foreword. For some this will mean becoming fee-based specialist IFAs. Some direct sales force agents are becoming multi-tied. Other advisor firms are becoming specialists in administration or even niche product providers. All this change will bring opportunities to reposition and carve out new opportunities. It should also mean that the customer is better served.

As part of these developments, there is a greater realisation that identification of specific customer groups and serving those customers more effectively, is one sure way to succeed. This perhaps explains the growing interest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programmes in the financial services market.

This guide has been written and supported by Microsoft Business Solutions in collaboration with financial services software partner Dunstan Thomas, in recognition that CRM programmes are not easy to get right first time. According to Gartner some 65 per cent of them fail. Part of the reason for these failures is that CRM is all too often treated as another technology implementation driven by the IT department. It is not!

Technology alone can never transform the relationships you have with your customers. CRM must be accompanied by a change management programme which breaks through organizational boundaries and cuts across functional divisions.

By necessity this sort of programme must be led and driven from the top of the organization. If the board don’t get fired up about it, it is more than likely that it will not achieve its stated objectives. It therefore goes without saying that this guide looks at both the technology and people issues involved in making your organization truly ‘customer centric’. We also see it as part of a journey for organizations. The articles that follow discuss the stages involved in successful CRM projects. They also deal with how to tackle the different agendas at work amongst different functions of any business. All these need to be considered and addressed if CRM projects are not to be derailed by the very people you need to make them a success. It is also important to have a customer centric vision for the business and create a customer strategy before building any CRM systems.

In addition any CRM system must be built with front to back office integration in mind and should use the power built up in your existing information architecture. If you can’t obtain a ‘single view of the customer’ this ought to be your first step in building any efficient information architecture for customer centricity.

Thanks must go to Microsoft Business Solutions for seeing the value of this short business guide and to CRM consultancy Round for providing some of the diagrams which help illustrate the complexities of realigning the business to create the right environment in order to make CRM projects a success.

Chris Read
Chairman
Dunstan Thomas