Offshoring data management can make CRM more successful

Achieving a return on investment from a client relationship management (CRM) system has by and large been extremely difficult for most professional services firms. Success is often heavily influenced by how the system is used, what it looks like and what reports are needed.

Unfortunately, most firms are not sufficiently clear about what data they need and how to manage it. Many firms also greatly underestimate the ongoing investment that they need to make in managing their data. In hard times, cutting headcount in the CRM team is often an early target. However this only starts a vicious cycle.

The starting point in managing your data effectively is to be clear about the information you will need and the data you currently have. This audit of your information should drive your data strategy. Whether you decide to outsource, offshore or increase the team in-house, you should always start with this audit. This is not as hard as you may think.

You should be clear from the start about what you consider to be of value or importance. This might be any of the following:

• number and value of instructions;

• growth potential;

• share of spend;

• strength of relationships;

• attendance at marketing events; or

• alignment with service line or industry business plans.

Is offshoring the solution?

Once you have a clear picture of what data matters to you most, you also need to consider how best to manage it.

One way to look at this is to analyse the importance and uniqueness of a particular piece of information. As a general rule, information that is unique and important to you should be managed by your own staff. That which is lower value or not unique is a prime candidate for being managed outside of the firm.

If having industry sector information is important for the segmentation of your data, it may be better to consider automating the process for gathering this rather than relying on a complicated internally-developed taxonomy, the creation of which can often consume vast amounts of time in the IT, finance, library and business development departments.

Although I am a convert to the use of offshore resources to assist with data management, this has to be approached carefully; consider the following.

• Do you have the right people in place in-house to establish and manage the relationship effectively? Ideally you need a manager who thoroughly understands the system and the current processes. Bear in mind that if you’re going to achieve good results you will need to document the processes thoroughly so that your offshore provider can quickly follow the workflow without making mistakes or wasting time.

• There are certainly cultural, language and time zone challenges. These are not the things that might spring to mind from negative press in the UK, but I would insist that, to mitigate these, your chosen supplier provides face-to-face support during the set up and for the first few months after going live.

• Understand that not all data management tasks are well suited to offshoring. Typically, those that are tactical in nature, that are process driven and can be easily standardised are best. Due to the time zone challenges, it is also best to consider those tasks that require minimal interaction with your users.

• You must enter into a written agreement with your offshore provider that specifically states that it will only process the data in accordance with your wishes and that sufficient physical, data and IT security measures are in place.

Provided you take note of these key issues, offshoring can be an extremely successful way of addressing the data management challenge while also controlling costs.