Blogs

The Twelve Days of CRM

By Brian Bolt posted 12-08-2020 12:18 PM

  

While retreating to a Zoom-free zone to develop this blog post, I was forced to wrestle with a fundamental communication requirement: who is/are my audience? 

I thought the question would be easily answered, but I couldn't even settle on the right verb. Would this blog post take a fortnight? I need to get this posted… the HEUG website becomes read-only on December 9!  Am I really panicking over a blog post?

After easing myself back from the ledge, I considered the theme that was provided for my post: "Xmas comm." Figuring that I'd found an easy foundation to build upon, I turned my attention to opening the post by reminiscing about the recent Thanksgiving holiday before diving into a CRM-related rendition of the “Twelve Days of Christmas.”

Then I remembered that half of the CX Advisory Group hail from the southern hemisphere and may know little about our turkey themed celebration of the harvest season. So much for starting my post by saying "With one gluttonous holiday behind us and four weeks of sugar and saccharin ahead…"  With my anxiety again rising, another audience attribute that was holding in the periphery of my mind bolted to the fore: HEUG members are highly educated… What would they think if I used idioms?  My amygdala attack was in full-force!

With perspiration and respiration returning to normal after a walk around the block, my focus returned to Boise State's CRM and cloud ERP journeys. Somewhere during the early days of planning for the Oracle Cloud project, I found a whitepaper or similar source that described the new HCM platform as a "system of engagement." That term stuck with me. I understood the marketing angle: put distance between the old, on-premise platform by brandishing it as merely a "system of record"; the new system is one of engagement!  Fast-forward three years and I noticed the same term was applied to CRM. However, in this instance, the difference was not just a marketing differentiation, but rather a fundamental function: the CRM is meant to manage interactions with customers (or the higher-ed equivalent “constituents”). And, the more you know about your constituents the better an institution will be at [insert your favorite superlative]: managing interactions; improving engagement; developing a connection; attracting, retaining, and graduating, et al.

All kidding aside, thoughtful and targeted communications underpin the success of our institutions and our relationships. CRMs enable enhanced engagement with constituents, but we can't forget that, as individuals, we own the ultimate outcome of our interactions. With this year almost in the rearview mirror, we have a month left in 2020 to calibrate our non-CRM supported interactions, whether as project lead to stakeholders and sponsors, as manager to employee (or vice-versa), or as a CX AG member writing a blog post to a world-wide community, and end the year with something other than good-riddance and resignation. With that in mind, on behalf of the CX Advisory Group, we wish you a well earned, restful Holiday season. 

As a final nod to the "Xmas comm" assignment, you're invited to sing aloud the "Twelve Days of CRM." If you're reading this on a Zoom call, you have a choice: should I sing this now or later?

The Twelve Days of CRM

On the first day of CRM, the organization gave to me...

  • A vision of a communications dream
  • 2 competing goals
  • 3 vague objectives
  • 4 measures of success
  • 5 layers of decision making
  • 6 decade constituent lifecycle
  • 7 systems of record
  • 8 business units
  • 9 recruiting pipelines
  • 10 hour work days
  • 11 license models
  • 12 project sponsors
0 comments
26 views

Permalink