Measuring CRM credibility

CRM is always under the spotlight as a department that is critical to the success story of any organisation. There are di?¬?erent ways to judge its maturity and performance, however one which has helped me most is a three stage ad-hoc, managed and optimised model.

Each relates to a certain set of behaviours, goals and results that help you understand the maturity of CRM and the support they are providing to achieve your commercial goals.

At this stage there is no strategic alignment of CRM with the commercial goals. For example, you may be running to cover the gap in gross or net revenues this month, active play days the next month and bonus costs the month after. Data, reporting and ful?¬?lment practices are manual, so more time is spent on getting things done and less and less on analysing and optimising. It is typically di?¬?cult to measure success since the criteria of success or failure will change often.

The delicate balance between people, process and technology is usually skewed and reliant on one of them due to historical reasons. Typically responsibility would be with everyone but accountability with no one speci?¬?cally. Most of your current practices are based on rituals – this is how we have always done stu?¬? and we will continue to do so.

The investment in any CRM tool or technology is not thoroughly mapped against the phases of introduction, adoption and support. The skills required to function as an e?¬?ective team are often missing or not acknowledged. Segmentation in its basic form would exist, and usually be based around RFM, or historical behaviour of your players. Your CRM plan would be multi-channel but may notnecessarily be based on player preferences.

Finding your way out from this stage will usually require a senior stakeholder getting involved and everyone rolling up their sleeves to deal with operational aspects of CRM.

At this maturity stage basic project management and support processes are in place. Business intelligence, content, design and marketing operations teams communicate and coordinate with each other.

All CRM processes and campaigns are documented and a history or library is ready for reference at any time. Skill and training gaps of those who manage CRM is dealt with through e?¬?ective training.

Your segmentation would include some form of scoring or predictive models. Campaign planning is no longer an exercise to ?¬?x short term gaps and each campaign is evaluated appropriately for ROI. Every communication channel is audited for its e?¬?ectiveness and has a de?¬?ned ‘policy’ to manage it.

At this stage you may ?¬?nd it di?¬?cult to support any real time campaigns and segmentation. The good news though is that A/B testing and control groups become a regular part of your optimisation e?¬?orts.

At this stage you are still reactive, so an honest appraisal would be required to understand the barriers and support required to move to a proactive approach.

At this stage implementation of every CRM activity is veri?¬?ed against the commercial strategy. The CRM team works with customer journey maps to evaluate how messaging impacts player experience, attrition or retention. Your reports and analytics are con?¬?gured to show how customer lifecycle is managed and the movement of players between each phase.

Critical revenue generating models like identi?¬?cation of high value customers or churn models will be in place. Your CRM plan is supported by multivariate testing and machine learning models to continuously understand the changing aspects of customer behaviour.

Congratulations if you believe you have reached this stage, but do remember that it requires your continuous attention and team work to remain here.