By Swatil Binte Mahmud, Blogger, Lava Protocols
One wrong move in a game of chess, and you lose. Sometimes the most minute details, thoughts, or actions can have large impacts and reactions. As the owner of a company, we know you want to provide the best for your customers. However, is it easier said than done?
Customers were once considered the heart of a company. Now, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has taken over companies’ hearts. This was a logical transition because if you cannot love, care, and tend to the needs of your customers, customers will leave. Failing to ensure proper CRM for your company can lead to serious problems, including shareholder lawsuits and financial meltdown. By now you are probably thinking whether I am exaggerating the importance of proper software selection and implementation. Poor use of CRM has led to public relations nightmares and even the biggest disasters in CRM history. In the worst cases, these events have completely bankrupted companies.
Hershey’s Bittersweet Lesson
Hershey is an American chocolate manufacturer. Reminiscing about my own childhood, I remember waiting for my father to come back from his international business trips with delicious Hershey’s chocolate bars and Hershey’s kisses. Good business and competition come hand in hand, and Hershey was facing competition from all sides. Without wasting time, Hershey reached out to CRM providers to shape up its client-relations and boost its profits. They spent a whopping $112 million (£75 million) for a CRM system. Disappointingly, this CRM system proved too clumsy and complex for Hershey’s suppliers and production line. Instead of working out a low-risk time of year to make such massive changes in their company, they timed their CRM implementation just before Halloween. Halloween is the time of the year when one of the biggest chocolate binges takes place in America. Hershey’s stream of chocolate production came to a screeching halt, resulting in a frozen factory and thousands of disappointed customers, and one of the biggest CRM disasters in the world.
Slightly Off Target
When Target was launching in Canada in 2013, they assumed they would not face problems importing their data from legacy systems into their new infrastructure. However, upon their launch, the entire company’s supply chain collapsed. Their data was riddled with errors— items were tagged with incorrect dimensions, prices, and manufacturers. Target undermined the importance of having a proper CRM software implemented to handle their data. It was later found out that data was put into the system by hand by entry-level employees with little or no experience. An investigation found that only about 30 percent of the data in the system was correct.
Therefore, a CRM software that fits your company like a glove is vital for your business to strive. It is important to incorporate technical and strategic advice from experts with deep knowledge across disciplines of CRM. This is where Salesforce and Lava Protocols come in! To help you and your business!
Salesforce Is Strong With This One
Salesforce, located in the heart of San Francisco, is a cloud computing service as a software (SaaS) company that specializes in customer relationship management (CRM). Salesforce offers unparalleled knowledge and decades of industry experience, and they will work with you to imagine what’s possible, plan your solution, oversee complex deployments, improve end-user adoption, and smoothly manage change in your company. Salesforce uses a human-centered approach, where a team of researchers, designers, developers, and architects create meaningful customer experiences that will drive real business impact and make your customers happy.
Lava Protocols is the friend you call in times of crisis, regardless of how big or small the issue is! Having a successful business and investing in a good CRM software like Salesforce will mean nothing if you keep trying to fit the wrong pieces in your puzzle. Lava Protocols ventured into consultation as a natural outcome of many customers seeking advice on which technologies best suited their needs, how to integrate them into their business processes, and how to get everyone on board with the solution. As a result, many companies in Malaysia and the ASEAN region met their business goals with the right mix of strategy, technology, and processes as suggested by Lava Protocols.
Lava Protocols team of certified consultants start by understanding your pain points in order to design a strategy that ensures a successful solution roll-out before choosing technology for you. This team will guarantee a cloud solution that grows and adapts according to the needs of your business — all built on the world’s premier cloud platforms. Getting everyone within a company onboard a new technology solution is almost as important as the solution itself (if not more so!). Hence, the certified Change Management team will work to integrate the new solution into your company’s business processes through a results-oriented, organic roll-out. With close to 14 years in Customer Touchpoint technology experience covering the journey of Marketing, Lead Generation, Sales, Customer Success, and Customer Support, the team at Lava Protocols are certainly not your regular system implementers.
As Lava Protocols says, ‘Technology is only one slice of your Digital Transformation. We’re here to make sure you get all the slices right.’ I do not know about you, I sure do like a good slice of pizza, and Lava Protocols is that perfect slice.
Lava Protocols is an authorized Salesforce Partner. Need a CRM Platform? Drop us an email to schedule your demo: hello@lavaprotocols.com.