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Dec 2006 Issue
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DATABASE SCREAMS! In This Issue:  The Professor's Corner: Is CRM User-Friendliness really achievable? WiseGuys News: DMSI wins Database Excellence award at NCDMWiseGuys Case Study - Supporting Marketing and Sales at Alamo
Ease of Use is Not The Answer: Part 1 How DMSI can Help You
Dear Friends, Christmas came early for DMSI this year - by way of a 2006 Database Excellence award from the National Center for Database Marketing (NCDM)! The award, presented in Orlando FL on Dec. 12 for our flagship WiseGuys Marketing application, was a joint entry with one of our valued clients. It represents the highest achievement in our industry (details below). We are humbled by this honor - and look forward to continued database excellence with our clients in 2007. Our theme this month is User-Friendliness. As my colleague David Lee points out, Three Dog Night originated "it's easy to be hard." But, in the world of CRM, it's hard to be easy. The multiplicity of features and functions in marketing applications has made ease of use a rare commodity. We provide some insight into dealing with feature/function overkill, and offer David's guest article to address the problem. Finally, a case study from a client that has enjoyed ease of use with WiseGuys. Happy Holidays! - and please let us know how DMSI can help you prosper in 2007!
Adjunct Professor, Marketing Information Systems
First, a "Quick" lesson in user friendliness. Since 1991, I have been an avid user of Quicken (and later, Quickbooks). Quicken of course set the standard for user friendliness, by taking a seemingly complex topic - accounting - and simplifying it to make it accessible to the masses. But more recently, after successive upgrades to "new and better" versions, my love affair with Quicken has cooled considerably. By adding endless features (more than I need), Intuit - the maker of Quicken - has made what was originally a simple program considerably more complicated. The lesson for Database Marketing and CRM users would appear to be that simplicity is better. But ease of use, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps the real test is whether your current/proposed application matches the current/planned maturity level of your organization. How would you know the maturity of your organization? Through a benchmarking audit. A Solution: Much like a needs assessment, a benchmarking process will examine your business model, the capabilities of your staff/resources, and your immediate and long term processing needs. From this review, you can see the tradeoffs between necessary features and functions versus simplicity. Benchmarking will give you a perspective on how much user friendliness you can reasonably expect, given the demands of your organization. Learn more: Call DMSI offices at (703) 941-8109 and we can explain how a Benchmarking study may help your organization. For an example a large client's benchmarking study, see our AARP case study.
Learn More: Find full conference information here www.NCDMWinter.com Also, to learn how WiseGuys can help jump start your marketing, Download the WiseGuys FAQ
We were glad to hear recently that WiseGuys passes the test in "tech support friendliness," from one of our clients, Kristi Eilander, User Support Specialist with the Alamo Group (IA), a corporation that designs, manufactures, and distributes agricultural parts and equipment. Part of Eilander's role as a user support specialist is maintaining the company's large database behind the scenes, something that has become much easier since the implementation of WiseGuys. "With WiseGuys, refreshing the database is now faster and easier," says Eilander. "Before, our IT staff would have to run the reports at night via Ecometry, our order entry system. We would hope a hiccup didn't occur and that the reports would be ready for marketing in the morning." "For our large database, the WiseGuys refresh is much faster, and a recent speed-up has made this even better," she explains. "WiseGuys is very easy to get started and let run, and our in-house marketing staff depends on the reliability of WiseGuys reporting." Providing territory managers with timely up-to-date catalog data is another important part of Eilander's job. "We take the refreshed marketing data and, through a web interface, display it for our territory managers," says Eilander. "This allows them to access the information quickly, and use the built-in Access search capabilities." "Within hours, not days or weeks, they can adjust their sales and marketing planning," she adds. "WiseGuys gives our team a better range of what they can do with the refreshed data, without it taking so long. Best of all, it puts the data directly in the hands of the end-user - and our IT staff need not be involved." Learn More: Find other case studies here, WiseGuys Case Studies
CRM systems too often fail to meet their objectives. They are unused, or under-used, and are not well loved by the sales and support staffs. We in the industry have decided that the problem is that CRM systems are too hard to use. If only they were easier, then they would be well-used and much loved. So we set about making our systems easier to use. Microsoft boasts that the new Microsoft CRM 3.1 system requires half the mouse clicks to navigate compared to the old 1.2 version. Salesforce.com waxes poetic about the small number of clicks needed to navigate its system. And even the venerable GoldMine system extols its ability to compress complex series of clicks into one-click macros. There is no doubt about it: CRM systems are getting easier to use. But implementations still fail at an alarming rate. What's going on? Maybe we are aiming at the wrong target. Maybe it doesn't matter that much whether it takes one click or two clicks to do a task. Maybe ease of use is not the holy grail of CRM. Imagine a CRM system where half the screen is occupied with 500 tiny icons. Each icon will perform a complex and important CRM task with a single click. Data fields would be automatically updated from other systems. Automated business process engines would launch whole series of events whenever pre-defined conditions were detected. It would be the pinnacle of ease of use. It would also be a failure. Nobody would ever remember what all of those icons meant. People would not understand why fields got updated and would stop trusting their data. People would avoid touching the system for fear of launching some mysterious process. They would go to plan B: A pen and a day timer. So what went wrong? The systems were easy to use. But they were hard to learn. Ease of learning and ease of understanding are far more important than ease of use. Sure, we should streamline systems where we can. But it is far more important that people understand what is going on and what they should do. We probably should have figured this out long ago. The typical CRM implementation plan includes an initial training phase. Everyone is trained and sent forth to conquer the world (or at least their territory). If they are lucky, they got good training with lots of hands-on exercises. If they are very lucky, they even get good technical support when things go wrong. And if they are draw-to-an-inside-straight lucky they might even get a well-designed CRM system that actually fits their business processes. Even then, it is not enough. In the typical sales force it takes 10 hires to get one or two "keepers." That means there is always new staff coming on board. So there are always people at every stage of learning the system. When the new rep comes on board, the formal training phase is done. He is pretty much on his own trying to learn the system. As staff turns over, more and more people are at various stages of their learning curve and those who attended formal training represent a decreasing percentage of the user population. Some people stop using the system (or never start), and others use it less than 100% of the time. Without full participation, much of the value of the system is lost. You cannot rely on finding all the information you need in the system. Reporting is less accurate so managers stop using the system as well. A downward spiral begins. This is not the Indy 500. It is LeMans. Acceleration (learning time) is much more important than top speed (ease of use). To win the CRM race, we need to shift our design focus from ease of use to ease of learning and ease of understanding. Many CRM vendors have started to focus on making their systems more intuitive and easy to learn. They should be commended. But the focus on ease of use has diluted their efforts. Sage CRM and Microsoft CRM have embedded their systems inside of Outlook. Since many people are already familiar with Outlook, they feel that this makes the systems more intuitive. There is some truth to this. But once you click on the CRM systems, your Outlook knowledge does not help you very much. The main advantage is that you cannot send an email without at least seeing the CRM system so it is at least more ubiquitous. To really address the issue of ease of learning, we must first ask "easy for whom?" There are distinct constituencies within the CRM user community. These include,
Ease of learning means different things to each group. The relative importance of ease of learning vs. ease of use vs. features and power is different for each. We must define ease of learning for each of these constituencies, and design our systems accordingly. One size does not fit all. Learn More: or more info on this article, contact David Lee at Vertical Marketing, Inc. Also, watch this newsletter for David's final word in this discussion:
Part 2: So how do we achieve ease of learning?
And now, pick up the phone! One call gets you 15 minutes of Free Database Advice
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Dec. 12, 2006. DMSI is pleased to announce that our flagship application - WiseGuys Marketing Software - has won a Database Excellence Award at the National Center for Database Marketing Conference (NCDM) in Orlando, FL. WiseGuys was selected as the Bronze Award winner in the Analytics & Modeling Applications category. The award was a joint entry with one of our valued clients - Porters Camera of Cedar Falls, Iowa. Previous award winners have included AOL and Dell. Knowing that this achievement is recognition from our peers in Database Marketing gives us added pride in this accomplishment. We continue to be encouraged by positive responses from our valued WiseGuys clients, and look forward to contributing to greater success in 2007. 
Part 1: If not Ease of Use, then what?
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