This year, companies across industries have shown a strong interest in revisiting the technologies that they use for customer engagement. As per analyst research reports more than half of enterprises have already implemented a CRM solution. A high percentage of these are investing more to upgrade and expand the features and tool sets to suit the current trends. In these improving economies, senior business executives are closely monitoring the ROI they expect from the customer engagement processes and technologies.
Companies need to build business cases with great effort on detailing to lower the risk of failure and increase the chance of delivering clear business results. Anticipated ROI has to be clearly articulated to get funding for these projects. So, how does a business case help you?
- Advances project approval process – Clear articulation of goals and benefits of the project leads to fewer revisions through the approval process for funding the project.
- Increases project success – The business case acts as a blueprint and provide clear direction on the reasons, goals and expected outcomes of the initiative that are quantifiable. This helps improving the project success.
- Objective decision making – Take an informed decision by moving the discussions into metric based, increases the objectivity while evaluating and selection of the right platform from multiple competing vendors.
Who are the key stakeholders whose inputs are required in creating a business case for CRM?
Business case sponsor: Every new initiative should have a sponsor who takes responsibility of the business case through evaluation, implementation and review and who ensures that the business case contributors commit to their estimates and assumptions.
Functional area stakeholders: These are the ones who are directly impacted by the CRM initiative. They will identify the business processes that require transformation, estimates the benefits and costs. These should be highly engaged as they own the business area that is being affected and should have a great influence and say in the project outcomes.
Technology Management team: This team will commit to the costs of the business case and also address the risk minimization of project implementations. They also commit to the feasibility of achieving the project benefits by committing to the varied costs on the project.
Finance: This organization is typically responsible for the financial models, validate the benefits around cost savings and avoidance.
Steering Committee: This is the decision making team that establishes a project governance structure, processes and prioritizes business case implementation. The steering committees should hear about the metrics around strategic alignment of the objectives, project execution risks, benefits realization and project costs.
Make sure to identify the right individuals across the stakeholder teams, taking their inputs to start working on your business case for CRM projects.