Corporate Training Magazine

Compliance and CRM: What You Haven't Heard
Vol 2 Issue 4- Jul/Aug 2006

By David Benjatschek

If you don't follow the rules, you pay the price.

Compliance is a topic that is ever increasingly taking center stage in today's corporate marketplace. Recent high-profile corporate scandals have launched compliance issues into full view.

Resultant legislation such as Sarbanes Oxley have put much tighter controls around the financial accountabilities that today's corporations must live up to. These tighter controls translate to higher costs resulting from increased internal activity around audit and reporting that involve everyone in an organization.

Companies that look at the new focus on compliance as an added cost of doing business can benefit greatly by reconsidering this view and reframing it as the spark that ignites the company's relentless search for best practice and success. CRM is one tool that can enable organizations to turn compliance from a cost into a competitive advantage.

Compliance is not just limited to the financial accountability arena. Considered broadly, compliance has implications throughout an organization, because it directly relates to the trust that customers have in the company, a factor commonly identified as one of the top three reasons why customers buy from a supplier. Breech compliance and you lose trust and business.

Consider these non-financial scenarios that also affect trust:

Inconsistency When clients and prospects hear different messages from different people in your organization, it affects the trust they have in dealing with you.
Commitment to Follow-through - When process isn't followed and you fall short in delivering your customer promise, it results in customer dissatisfaction and weakens the trust a client has in your ability to deliver future products and solutions.
Employee Learning Curve - While newer employees ramp up learning accepted process and practice in an organization, it can affect delivery of your customer promise. It can also impact internal team morale‹the trust that your employees need to have in one another to work together towards success.

Each of these scenarios illustrates how the cost of non-compliance does not only apply only to finance, but to sales, service and all other functional areas within the organization. In those arenas, compliance is simply the ability of an organization to consistently deliver on their customer promise while also protecting shareholder value.

Commitment to quality CRM can allow you to take your processes that customers rely on and empower your employees to deliver on a consistent basis by customizing action plans or strategies within the solution. They do so by forcing employees to sequentially address all the tasks that compose a process. These tasks are daily reminders of what needs to be done to successfully deliver your customer promise, along with hints to get help should they need it. With consistent delivery of your customer commitment (promise made, promise kept) comes the building of new trust and new business.

Not sure whether you've agreed internally on what best practice is yet? Start by implementing 'good' practice and leverage your CRM solution's ability to measure what 'best practice' in your organization looks like. By using CRM tools to capture process, you can identify what your top performers regularly did above and beyond good practice to achieve the results that they did. As you review and adapt improvements, it creates a cycle of continuous improvement delivered through your CRM solution.

David Benjatschek is president of Lighthouse Marketing Solutions.