Customer Relationship Management And Crm Kpi

Customer relationship management or CRM refers to all of the processes that an organization makes use of to organize and track its contacts or relationships with prospective and current customers. Hence, CRM covers quite a wide array of activities, departments, and processes, from front desk or first line interactions to analytical and behind the scene procedures. These varied practices are sometimes tracked and monitored using so-called key performance indicators or KPI practices are sometimes tracked and monitored using so-called key performance indicators or KPIs. There will be a good variety of CRM KPI to consider, associated with the different aspects of the entire customer relationship management paradigm.

CRM can be more or less divided into four separate but interrelated aspects: front office operations, back office operations, business relationships, and analysis. Front office operations would refer to that part of the system involving dealing with customers directly, whether face to face or through the phone or the Internet. Back office operations, on the other hand, vary from business to business, and involve those processes necessary to provide the appropriate products or services to the customers. Business relationships, the next aspect of customer relationship management, involve, as the term implies, forming working relationships with other companies and organizations as opposed to clients or customers. That is, these would be the firms that a business finds itself working with, as a manufacturer would work with a distributor, and so on.

Key performance indicators refer to particular measurable quantities or metrics that serve as either the most relevant or most important signs of progress or performance in particular aspects. In practice, they are usually not chosen by themselves or out of nowhere. Instead, they form an integral part of a measurable, objective goal. For instance, such a goal may be Increase gross sales by 10% from 2008 to end of year 2009. The KPI in this case would be gross sales. Of course, this specific example would not be applicable or appropriate to all organizations. Other possible KPI’s could be net profit, customer satisfaction rate, return client percentage, employee turnover, and so on and so forth.

In customer relationship management, some performance metrics may be identified in general. Front office operations, for example, would want to process customers not only quickly, but also thoroughly. That is, not only average handling time or maximum customer capacity is important, but also customer satisfaction ratio and percent of cases fully resolved. For the back office and analysis aspects, on the other hand, other KPIs would be more relevant to consider, mostly relating to the speed and efficiency of information storage, processing, and analysis.

But, of course, CRM KPI would be useless without a solid strategic plan backing them up. It would not help much to measure an assortment of quantities if they are not integrated and considered as painting a whole picture of organizational performance. However, if they are used with the proper context and mindset, metrics and key performance indicators will be able to provide invaluable insight into often mis-estimated overall performance.

Find The Best Kpis Collection Ever

Balanced scorecard system has a very simple concept. Its creators, Norton and Kaplan, were the first to include nonfinancial indicators to the list of measures to be evaluated in order to assess business performance of a company. Key performance indicators (KPIs for short) are all important. It is possible to set the right goals and make the right decisions but it is not possible to achieve positive results when evaluating the wrong key performance indicators. Choice of key performance indicators predetermines overall balanced scorecard success. The history of business world knows many examples of balanced scorecard failures related to the wrong choice or the wrong evaluation of key performance indicators.

To begin with, it needs mentioning that key performance indicators are not just measures that demonstrate company progress or regress on the way to implement strategic goals. KPIs represent critical success factors in various environments the company operates in. Balanced scorecard consists of four categories: financial, customer, internal business processes, learning and growth. Logically, each category has own set of key performance indicators which are however are related to KPIs in other categories. For example, such key performance indicator as sales proposals per one customer is directly related to sales growth rate. Employee satisfaction is linked to customer satisfaction as statistics show that the most satisfied employees in the company have the most satisfied customers, i.e. those who bring the most money for the company.

One shouldnt be in a hurry when making a choice of key performance indicators. Of course, there are KPIs collections and ready to use sets. It is OK to use them but one needs to remember that every business is individual and every implementation process of balanced scorecard is individual as well. Something that perfect lease use one company may be hazardous for another, even if the companies are operating in the same market and in the same industry. At the same time it is very useful to refer to KPIs collections. As a rule, key performance indicators are grouped by industries and balanced scorecard categories. For example, if are most interested in financial indicators youll certainly find the most effective KPIs in financial category in such a KPI collection. In case youre looking for key performance indicators for nonprofit sector you should browse such categories as government, public and nonprofit organizations.

What should one pay attention to when selecting key performance indicators? First of all they should be measurable. One should clearly understand how a particular key performance indicator is measured and what they obtained information means for the company. The second most important factor is significance of the selected KPI for the overall performance. This explains importance of setting weights for Paris key performance indicators. For instance, if the company has problems with customer relations the customer category and all customer KPIs should have more weight than those key performance indicators in the learning and growth category.

We should stress again that there are no universal key performance indicators that will perfectly suit all companies. Use as many resources and KPIs collections as you can and choose the best KPIs for your company.