Six Sigma for CRM

About a year and a half ago, I was approached by a Customer looking to Implement Six Sigma as a Sales Process within SAGE SalesLogix.

After taking some time to review the concepts and how to apply them, we ended up building a custom module to allow us to qualify and quantify the Sales Cycle, and Improve the sales forecasting.

After it was all said and done, it was clear to me that Six Sigma for Sales and Business Intelligence are tied together by the waist.

As part of your Six Sigma design, your first step is to identify your measurements. The next step is to generate the equation to score your Opportunities.

When it came time for Implementation, we needed to build the components to allow the user to "grade" their opportunities, while on the background we ran the calculations and generated an overall score that allowed us to better identify the probability of an Opportunity.

Of course, once the functionality was on the system, we needed to give Managers access to this data in actionable formats.

At the end, I came to love the Six Sigma approach to Sales and Customer Service, but it was quite obvious that in order to successfully implement it you need to have the tools and the expertise at hand to process the data and find yourself in a position to improve your business.

Visit our web site to learn more about using Six Sigma processes and methodologies within your CRM Implementation.

CRM and Business Intelligence

A succesful CRM Implementation requires more than just BI reporting. We need to build the Data Warehouse content with transactions and static profiles for:

• Customer “touches” including SFA data.
• Sales transactions and associated accounts receivable.
• Customer intelligence: statistics, order patterns, etc.
• Service calls and results: include comments from service personnel on issues as they arise.
• Customer complaints and resolutions: contents and trends.
• Call-center and telemarketing activity: what the CSRs are learning from the customers.- Marketing promotion: how marketing and promotional efforts are performing.
• Competitor intelligence: what competitors are doing and what the industry is saying about them.

Business Intelligence for your CRM system

BI techniques

- Performance Benchmark Comparison: Compare important KPIs with benchmarks that make sense (e.g. actual versus budget). Additionally, compute metrics that relate to performance and compare them across divisions, products, market segments, etc.

- Performance Alerting: Use KPI comparisons to identify performance.

- Trend Analysis and Alerting: Short or long term trends of performance metrics are good indicators of problems that are not apparent.

- Forecasting and Alerting: Even if current metrics are within acceptable bounds, the future may be problematical. Apply predictive models and reasses the adequacy of forecast critical metrics is valuable.

- Alerting to Unusual Situations: Time series analysis will often highlight hidden issues (e.g. with changes in customer, supplier, manufacturing or marketing activity).
For example, the credit rating of a customer may be altered if the statistical properties of its payment pattern alter significantly.

Business Intelligence for your CRM system

Guidelines for Business Analytics

1.- Identify controllable business variables in the business.
2.- Determine the processes and relevant decisions that impact the controllable variables.
3.- Identify the BI systems

4.- Design the business analytics that are base for the decision automation:

• business rules
• predictive analyses
• time series analyses
• etc.

5.- Evaluate feasibility and profitability of implementing the analytics.

Business Intelligence for your CRM system