"Your Call Is Important to Us..."

Is CRM [Customer Relationship Management software] a bridge too far for a firm?  This question is probably a tar pit from which one cannot emerge unsullied with a single, unitary correct answer, but as both the power of CRM applications and the competitiveness of the landscape grow, it's none to soon to ask this question about your firm if you haven't already.

The goal of CRM is breathtakingly easy to state:  To make your business more client-centric.  What does that mean in reality?  Among other things:

• that from the inception of a relationship as a prospect through initial engagement and, we may hope, outwards to the horizon, information about the client (both "soft" and "hard") is captured and available to anyone positioned to deal with the client;
• that fee earners see and understand with crystal clarity that their return for getting information into the system is repaid multiple times over once they have a deeper and more intimate view of the client's needs and history with the firm; and
• that information is recorded only once and only in one place.

Undertaking a CRM implementation, particularly in the culturally baroque venue of an "eat what you kill" firm, realistically means a few additional consderations:

• keep it simple ;
• do not try to do everything;
• focus only on what key fee earners and decisionmakers need.

Typically, the key functionalities and pieces of information have to do with the firm's history with the client, who has interacted with whom on what, and some rudimentary "segmentation" facility for assessing at a very seat-of-the-pants level whether a client would be receptive to an overture from another of the firm's practice groups. 

As I said, CRM—perhaps like KM—has a blindingly simple appeal.  So the devil is in the details.  But how irritated have you been to call your credit card company about a billing question, dutifully punch in your 16-digit account number (and maybe your zip code as well), to be delivered to a noxious numbered menu of irrelevant choices, at last to get the ear of a human being, and begin at once by starting all over with your account number?  That system was designed by a bank-centric, not a customer-centric, brain.  Don't do as they do.