Murder At The SMB: The CRM Autopsy Report

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Apr 2008 by Sims, David

The sheet is pulled back from the corpse on the gurney in the examination room. The CEO's stomach clamps up. "It's... it's him," he says as his knees buckle. "It's our CRM." His secretary helps him to a chair.

"Is there an autopsy report?" the CEO croaks. "Can you figure out who did it?"

The pathologist stubs out his cigarette and glances at the clipboard in his hand. "There are a few things I picked up. Now might be a good time to go over them." He nods to the detective sitting in the room, who flips open a notepad.

"Hope you don't mind the lieutenant sitting in," the doctor says. "Figured we'd save ourselves some time."

"No, no. lieutenant." The CEO nods to the detective, who nods back. "Anything to find the murderer. Well. Let's have it. What was the cause of death?"

"I'll start from the beginning," the doctor says. "And the officer might be able to fill in some of the missing pieces." The detective poises his pen over the notepad.

"First off, it looks to me like your firm was ignoring the big picture, and nobody there really had much of a clue how CRM fit in the overall business strategy," the doctor says. "In my line of work I see a lot of D.O.A. CRM projects, and nineteen times out of twenty, the company hasn't a clue what their competitive advantage over their competition is. They bring in CRM to try to turbo-charge a car with no steering wheel. Spend all that money, that time training people, rejigging the company's organizational structure, you wouldn't believe some of the things I've seen. Fistfights."

The CEO nods. "Our IT VP always hated the guy. I guess he had a pretty good motive."

The doctor smiles. "That's usually the case. CRM usually gets fobbed off on IT even though he's not an IT project, is he? And yes, it does play havoc with the IT department. He doesn't get many Christmas cards from IT. But I rarely see CRM killed by IT."

The CEO swallows. "Go on."

"Not to speak ill of the dead," the doctor continues, lighting another cigarette which he uses to point at the body under the sheet, "but CRM here wasn't the most likeable guy. When I opened him up I found him pretty inflexible. Had a hard time growing with your company and your customers, if I don't miss my guess. When you saw areas that needed more attention from him he wasn't always able to scale to that, was he?"

The secretary speaks up for the first time. "No, he wasn't. We got him because he worked really well for our partners, but they're a lot bigger, and... well, maybe he wasn't exactly what we needed. We changed as a company, we evolved, but he... didn't."

The doctor nods. The detective in the back is writing furiously.

"So he wasn't the most popular guy at the company. Sales people were feeling constrained, and for what he was costing the company he wasn't seen as pulling his weight, was he?"

"Our CFO really, really hated the guy," the CEO says. "Better ask him where he was on the night of August 12th."

The doctor snorts. "CFOs don't kill CRM near as often as other profiled suspects. May I continue?" The CEO spreads his arms as if to say the floor is yours.

"So we have a guy who was pretty expensive and not what everybody wanted. What happened, and correct me if I'm wrong here, is that after a while, employees thought this guy's just too hard to work with. Nobody used him, and they'd cross over to the other side of the corridor when they saw him coming. And can you blame them? He didn't come with his own training modules or easy to follow icons and windows. He was pretty difficult. Not the first guy picked for softball at the company picnic."

"There's something else that needs to be said here," the secretary says again. The CEO shoots her a you-better-be-careful look. "The system he replaced was pretty popular among the employees. We got rid of a comfortable, easy to use, familiar tool for... for..."

"Amanda," the CEO says. "If you have something to confess you'd better come clean."

"No," the doctor says, laying an avuncular hand on the secretary's shoulder. "We're not saying Amanda, or too many other people, warmed up to CRM. But she didn't kill him."

"Let's focus a bit on the training," the detective says. All heads turn his direction. "Were the employees given enough training so they felt comfortable working with the guy? We're talking about going from a tricycle to a Harley-Davidson when you hired him, was the company prepared in advance for that?"

"I told HR to get on it," the CEO explodes angrily. "They kept saying 'don't worry about it, we've got it all under control,' I bet they wanted him out of the way."

"Oh they did," the detective says. "But not enough to kill him. Sure he was costly and time-consuming, yours isn't the biggest operation in the world and he was eating a lot of resources, but the training officer did her best, given what she had to work with. But one thing I saw during the autopsy was that in your company, the actual fact is that only a few select teams and people were ever really fully introduced to him."

"Well... I... you can't stop what everyone's doing," the CEO says. "The rollout was gradual."