Before planning our CRM initiative, leaders from our business strategy and IT teams mapped out every kind of contact our customers can have with our organization. Although this exercise may sound simplistic, in practice it is a very complex undertaking. The customer touchpoint map details how all of our individual customers within a company, from purchasing professionals to administrative assistants, interact with Boise. For example, customers might contact a sales representative, call a customer service center, accept a delivery from one of our drivers, or order products online or via fax. In essence, we created an outside-in view of our processes.

It was important that IT staff participate in this touchpoint-mapping exercise because it gave them valuable insights into how our customers use our technology, both directly and indirectly. That helped our IT team focus on the specific technologies that would improve service to our customers and weed out those that weren’t right for our goals. For example, instead of buying a complete end-to-end CRM suite, we chose individual software applications for customer interaction and campaign management that met specific customer needs and integrated them with our existing order-processing technologies.

Develop IT Strategies for Specific Customer Needs

Once the IT department has a comprehensive understanding of how customers interact with your company, it can play a pivotal role in developing and executing business strategies. At Boise, we create cross-functional teams that pair IT leaders with our business development managers. The teams outline specific customer needs, then determine the technology strategies that will bring the best possible solutions to the customer.

Make Implementation Easy on Your Customers, Not Your Company

Don’t lose sight of your customers when implementing technology strategies. Boise’s CRM initiative would not be a success if we had inconvenienced our customers. Because we applied new technology to our two largest customer channels, phone and Web, it was paramount that both remain fully functional.

To minimize the effect of the transition on our customers, the IT and business development teams outlined all of the steps in our CRM initiative and how each step could potentially affect customers. For example, one step involved cleansing and loading 2.2 million customer and contact records from multiple disparate databases into a single customer profile database. To prevent disruption to customers, this exercise was performed during nonbusiness hours.

Create a Customer-Focused Culture

The last thought I’ll leave you with is that adapting a customer-focused approach to technology in most companies requires a cultural change. IT is often viewed as a department that supports all of the other functions of a company. Unless the entire company is committed to viewing its systems from the customers’ perspective, IT will continuously be asked to support projects that meet the short-sighted goals of internal departments. As CEO, a key part of my responsibility is to make sure that the entire company understands the value of our new CRM systems and business model. I stayed very close to the work, and I personally presented our new capabilities to many of our customers.