Gearing Up for Second-Wave CRM: 3 Principles for Building the Right Foundation

Customer relationship management (CRM) technology may be booming in terms of sales and its "shiny" new capabilities, but its business impact is less definitive. According to a late 2013 report by Econsultancy, only 28 percent of companies are satisfied with their conversion rates.

What can we glean from this? For one thing, before organizations set their sights on second-wave CRM developments such as using data from mobile and social channels to improve their customer view, they first must master the CRM basics. If companies are still finding their balance with existing CRM functionality, they may struggle to realize the full benefits of new data streams and technology.

Here are three guiding principles for making sure that your business can successfully ride — not drown in — CRM's second wave:

1. Size up your audience. As you should do with any major marketing decision, start with a thorough understanding of where your customers are and, more insightfully, where they're going. Look past what other industries or your competitors are adopting and focus on the audience you want to convert. If your customer base isn't doing business with you on smartphones and tablets, then why focus limited resources on linking mobile activity to CRM?

For example, we're not at a point yet where people are refinancing their mortgages on their smartphones while standing in line at a movie theater, so there probably isn't a strong need for launching a mobile mortgage refinancing app and uniting it with a CRM application.

2. Make goal-oriented growth plans. Once you've confirmed that a new customer-facing channel would give your current CRM solution a valuable boost, be prepared to properly integrate the requisite data. Work backwards from the desired outcome (e.g., whether it's putting a mobile strategy in place that focuses on collecting data from smartphone customers rather than both smartphone and tablet users) and decide what kind of data your business needs to make sound decisions.