Author: Stephen Judd

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CRM for Extension – Wrapping Up

Stephen Judd is serving as the eXtension Foundation Customer Relationship Management Fellow. This post is an update on progress on this funded Fellowship from the USDA-NIFA New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement.

Making a decision about using a customer relationship management (CRM) system for an Extension organization is a major undertaking. The decision can have long-range effects on your organization’s business processes, costs, and user satisfaction. Changing CRMs can also be a major project, so making a good decision upfront will help prevent additional cost and frustration later. Take time to critically analyze your existing business processes, goals, users and their needs, and the resources you have to invest in CRM. Ensure that the CRM you choose aligns with these goals, will be able to grow with your organization’s use cases, and will be be manageable with your technical resources.

Summary

  • Why are we evaluating? – What organizational goals do you think CRM will help you achieve?
  • Constraints – Budget, technical resources, organizational directives
  • Users  – Who’s going to be using the CRM? Create personas and refer to them throughout the evaluation process.
  • Use cases – Prioritize and define the use cases for CRM in your organization. Think about how business processes can or should change.
  • Functionality – For the CRMs you are evaluating, will their functionality adequately address your needs. If not, can the functionality be added, given your resources.

A valuable avenue we haven’t discussed is to talk with other organizations about their experience with CRM. With any CRM there are implementation and user adoption issues that are experienced during implementation and use. Understanding what others have experienced can help your organization anticipate these issues and determine if a particular CRM can help minimize, or will amplify the issues. (Note that I’m happy to discuss CRM with anyone who is interested.)

I welcome feedback and questions at stephen.judd@unh.edu 

Previous post: CRM for Extension – Digging Deeper

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CRM for Extension – Digging Deeper

Stephen Judd is serving as the eXtension Foundation Customer Relationship Management Fellow. This post is an update on progress on this funded Fellowship from the USDA-NIFA New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement.

Once you’ve evaluated your candidate customer relationship management systems (CRM) against the basic functionality outlined in my previous post, it’s time to dig a little deeper and see how the CRM addresses the needs identified in your use cases. You should also have enough information at this point to ensure that the candidate CRMs align with your resources (budgetary and technical.)

Use your use cases

In one of the sample use cases, I stated “Reilly would like to be able to accomplish this using a mobile phone shortly after the interaction or through an email application, without having to log in to a separate interface.” This raises the question of whether a candidate CRM system will enable this type of interaction. Does the CRM have a mobile app or interface? Does the CRM integrate with your existing email application? Is there an additional cost associated the mobile app or email integration?

Another use case stated, “Sam uses the CRM to keep track of current council members, their roles, and term on the council for Sam’s county.” It is unlikely that any candidate CRM will have been designed specifically for tracking Advisory Council members. How could the existing features of the CRM be leveraged to track this information? Would it require custom development work or is it something an administrator could configure easily?

Go through all of your use cases and using the CRM Implications section, identify the features and functionality you have identified a need for. For each of these, assess the candidate CRM systems for their ability to handle. Some prioritization of needs may be necessary if the candidate CRMs aren’t able to provide functionality for certain needs.

Understand costs

Given your budgetary constraints, it’s imperative to understand the costs associated with the candidate CRMs. Many CRMs use a software-as-a-service model where the company hosts and updates the application and charges you licensing fees, based on the number of users (staff) or per contact. It will be important for you to have an idea of the number of users (staff) you intend to use the system and an estimate of the number of contacts (people) you plan to track with the CRM.

Other costs:

  • Hosting – if the CRM is one that you will need to host on your own servers, waht is that cost to your organization?
  • Integration – Is there a cost to integrating with other systems (this could be development or licensing costs)?
  • Administration – people from your organization will need to administer the CRM – dealing with new users, permissions, configuration changes, etc. What will be the cost to the organization of those peoples time?
  • Training – What are the resources required to train staff in the use of the CRM?
  • Development – If you plan to develop a custom CRM or customize one of the candidate CRMs, what will that cost?

Documentation and Training

Implementing a CRM will require training users in its appropriate use. The candidate CRMs should be looked at through the lens of the user and how easy they are to use. Examining the CRM’s documentation and support resources is an important step to determine how much you will need to invest in training and documentation development. If you are considering developing a custom CRM, don’t forget to factor in the cost of creating documentation and custom training.

Existing Data

It is likely that your organization already has a lot of information about the people you interact with that you would like to have available in the CRM. You should assess the candidate CRMs to determine how this information can be imported in bulk. Since you’ll probably have information coming from multiple sources, the ability to identify and eliminate duplicate records will be an important consideration.

Timeframe

Determine how long it will take to implement the candidate CRMs. Like most projects, it will likely take longer than you initially think. Does your project have a deadline? Can the CRM be implemented in phases? Who will be responsible for the implementation?

 

I welcome feedback and questions at stephen.judd@unh.edu 

Previous post: CRM for Extension – Evaluating the Basics

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CRM for Extension – Evaluating the Basics

Stephen Judd is serving as the eXtension Foundation Customer Relationship Management Fellow. This post is an update on progress on this funded Fellowship from the USDA-NIFA New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement.

Virtually all customer relationship management systems (CRM) will have some common core functionality. These features are prerequisites for a CRM to be useful, but the implementations can be different. As an early step in your evaluation, assessing how this core functionality works, how configurable it is, and how it fits with your use cases is important. 

Common functionality

  • Contacts – the people you are keeping track of
  • Accounts – a grouping of contacts, could be a business/company, farm, organization, household, etc.
  • Lists / Campaigns – a set of accounts or contacts that share common attributes or interests
  • Reports – customizable views of the data stored in the CRM
  • Users – the staff who will be interacting with the CRM

People example

A CRM needs to be able to store information about people (contacts.) Typically, a contact will be a single record that has values for various attributes or fields (e.g., first name, last name, email, phone, address.) You should ensure that the provided fields will enable your use cases, or that custom fields can be easily added, given your organizational resources. 

Some attributes may require multiple values, like email. The contact record may have multiple fields – email1, email2, email3 – or it may have a separate record for each email address and allow you to relate them to the contact. Depending on what you know about the contacts you will be storing and how you plan to use the addresses, one method may be better than the other.

Considerations / Questions

  • Object and fields – Does the CRM you are evaluating have the types of objects (contacts, accounts, etc.) you will need, based on your use cases? If not, is there a way to create custom objects or fields, given your organizational resources?
  • Licensing / Pricing – What is the per user cost of the CRM? Is there a limit on contacts that can be stored? Is cost based on the number of contacts?
  • Permissions / Privacy – What information can different users view and edit? Do you need to restrict access for certain users? Can attributes/fields have view/edit restrictions or is it at the object (e.g., contact) level?
  • Types of records – Can there be different types of records and how does that work? You may want certain attributes only for certain types of records, for example, for volunteers you may want the year they started volunteering, but not want that field on other types of contacts.
  • Lists / campaigns – How does the CRM handle creating lists of contacts? Can you send email to these lists directly from the CRM or do you need to export to another system? Is there a cost associated with sending emails? 
  • Interactions – How can you track the interactions with contacts in the CRM? Are these visible to everyone, just the user recording them, or customizable? 
  • Reports – How difficult is it to create reports and run them? Can the report information be exported for use in other programs or visualizations? How is access to reports controlled?
  • Duplication – How does the CRM determine that records are duplicates of each other? Is there an easy way to merge them?
  • Integration – Can the CRM be integrated with other systems you are currently using (e.g., event registration, mass email)? 
  • Bulk data – What is the process to get existing data into the CRM?

Summing up

Given the personas and use cases you’ve compiled, evaluating the basic CRM functionality, as outlined above, will give you a good first pass at the CRM systems you’re evaluating. This will help you determine which ones should be evaluated further, and which are not suitable for your needs.

I welcome feedback and questions at stephen.judd@unh.edu 

Previous post: CRM for Extension – Use Cases

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CRM for Extension – Use cases

Stephen Judd is serving as the eXtension Foundation Customer Relationship Management Fellow. This post is an update on progress on this funded Fellowship from the USDA-NIFA New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement.

Armed with our goals and personas, it’s time to articulate what our people will actually do with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. At this point, we’re still not evaluating specific CRMs, but identifying its uses, so that we will be able to assess which features and capabilities will be needed for our organization. 

To accomplish our task, we will build up a library of use cases that will help us identify how our CRM should behave. These use cases will be based around the business processes where we believe CRM will be useful and will take the perspective of the personas we’ve created.

Description of use cases from usability.gov:

“A use case is a written description of how users will perform tasks on your website.  It outlines, from a user’s point of view, a system’s behavior as it responds to a request. Each use case is represented as a sequence of simple steps, beginning with a user’s goal and ending when that goal is fulfilled.”

In our situation, we won’t focus on the individual steps of a process, but rather on the tasks associated with particular use cases. These tasks will help inform us of the CRM features or capabilities that we will want to be evaluating for when looking at specific CRM systems. We can assume that any CRM will be able to store the contact information (name, email, phone, address, etc.) for people. We’ll also be assuming that the people interacting with the CRM have the necessary licenses and/or permissions to accomplish their tasks.

Example use cases:

Use Case 1 Advisory Councils
Actor Persona – Extension Support Staff – Sam
Each county in our Extension organization has an Advisory Council, comprised of citizens and decision-makers that help guide the activities of Extension in that county. Sam uses the CRM to keep track of current council members, their roles, and term on the council for Sam’s county. Sam is often asked for a list of council members and their roles.
Tasks
  • Lookup or create contact and contact info
  • Add contact to a list of Advisory Council members
  • Create or edit information related to Advisory Council membership
  • Create or run report of current Advisory Council members with specific information about them and their membership
CRM Implications
  • Duplicate person (contact) management
  • Way to create lists or groups of people
  • Custom information (fields) for certain types of lists
  • Customizable reports and filters

 

Use Case 2 Track interactions with people
Actor Persona – Extension Specialist / Agent / Educator – Reilly
Extension professionals have many interactions with the people we serve each day. Reilly would like to keep track of many of these interactions in the CRM, both to help as Reilly has subsequent interactions with the person and to assist colleagues that may interact with the same person. Ideally, Reilly would like to be able to accomplish this using a mobile phone shortly after the interaction or through an email application, without having to log in to a separate interface. Reilly also needs to be able to generate reports of these interactions.
Tasks
  • Lookup or create contact and contact info
  • Record interaction with person
  • Create or run report of interactions for specified time periods
CRM Implications
  • Duplicate person (contact) management
  • Way to create and associate interactions with people (contacts)
  • Visibility of interactions for other users of CRM
  • Integration with email application
  • Mobile interface or app

 

Use Case 3 Government officials / decision-makers
Actor Persona – Extension Administrator – Pat
Part of the continued support and funding for Extension programs is based on the support of government officials and decision-makers. Pat would like to use CRM to maintain the contact information for these people and record interactions with them. Pat needs reports that can be shared with  others in the organization.
Tasks
  • Lookup or create contact and contact info
  • Indicate that person is government official or decison-maker
  • Record interaction with person
  • Create or run report of interactions for specified time periods
CRM Implications
  • Duplicate person (contact) management
  • Way to create lists or groups of people
  • Custom information (fields) for certain types of lists
  • Way to create and associate interactions with people (contacts)
  • Visibility of interactions for other users of CRM
  • Customizable and shareable reports and filters

These three use cases are simplified, but could be made as detailed or complex as you’d like. Their purpose is to describe the way people will interact with the CRM and help identify the specific CRM features and capabilities that we should evaluate.

The use cases should be based on what people will actually need to do with the CRM to conduct business processes that you’ve identified that fit with your organizational goals. Implications for how data may need to be structured and shared will be important when you are doing the actual evaluation of CRM systems.

Based on the use cases above, we can start constructing a list of CRM features for evaluation:

  • Duplicate management
  • Contact grouping or lists
  • Custom attributes for contacts or lists
  • Tracking interactions
  • Sharing and visibility between CRM users
  • Reporting capabilities, including customization, sharing, filtering, saving, etc.

Other use cases you may consider developing include managing mass email, event registrations, and volunteer hour tracking. The sky’s the limit, just keep them aligned with your people and the business processes that fit your organizational goals.

I welcome feedback and questions at stephen.judd@unh.edu 

Previous post: CRM for Extension – Personas

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CRM for Extension – Personas

Stephen Judd is serving as the eXtension Foundation Customer Relationship Management Fellow. This post is an update on progress on this funded Fellowship from the USDA-NIFA New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement.

As previously discussed, when evaluating customer relationship management software (CRM) for Extension it is important to understand how CRM fits with the organization’s goals and strategies. Perhaps equally important, is understanding the people who will be using the CRM. Throughout the process, you must keep in mind who the users are, what they need to accomplish, and how they’ll interact with the CRM.

A recommended approach, used in user-centric software design and marketing, is to develop user personas. From Wikipedia: “A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of users.” Through the thoughtful creation of a handful (3-6) of personas that represent the broader groups of people who will interact with the CRM, an evaluation team can maintain a user-centered focus on the CRM, while also aligning with organizational goals.

The ultimate success of a CRM implementation will hinge as much on user adoption and satisfaction, as it does on the capabilities of the CRM. Users will enter and use data, create and use reports, and help identify new opportunities and obstacles.

Below are some example, abbreviated personas that can serve as a starting point for Extension organizations to build appropriate personas that represent their people and circumstances.

Example persona – Extension Administrator

Pat has been the Assistant Director of Operations and Governmental Affairs for Cooperative Extension for three years. Pat has worked in three different Extension organizations, starting as a community development specialist twenty years ago. Pat’s current responsibilities include maintaining and cultivating relationships with government and university officials throughout the state and encouraging their support for Extension activities.

Pat often meets individually, attends meetings, exchanges email, and has phone calls with decision-makers. Pat reports on these interactions to the Director and Leadership Team at their regular meetings. Pat keeps track of these interactions in a daily calendar and in email.

Example persona – Extension Specialist / Agent

Reilly has been a Plant Health Specialist with Extension for the past seven years. When a graduate student, Reilly worked in a diagnostic lab and enjoyed solving problems and helping growers address their issues. Now, in addition to doing diagnostic work, Reilly visits agricultural operations with the local Ag. agents for consultations and presents at workshops for growers.

Reilly has a local database to track plant samples, clients, and diagnoses and keeps track of farm visits and workshops in Outlook. Reilly also interacts with a number of colleagues around the country and at the Department of Agriculture to conduct research, brainstorm problems, and address emerging issues. 

Example persona – Extension Support Staff

Sam has worked as an administrative assistant in the county extension office for two years. It was overwhelming at first, trying to learn about all of the natural resources and agriculture programs that needed support, but Sam, as a former 4-Her, caught on quickly. It took a while to sort through Sam’s predecessor’s files and lists, but Sam now has a system that seems to work. Sam is adept with computers and enjoys keeping spreadsheets of participants from Extension events, creating event flyers and emails, and interacting with the clientele who pop by the office.

Sam’s day is never the same, varying from planning and promoting a big upcoming workshop, answering phone calls, preparing factsheets, coordinating meetings, designing flyers, posting to the website, etc. 

About personas

In getting started with personas, it is important to remember that they are meant to be representative of a type or group of people – they can’t capture every individuality. They are a tool that will help maintain a focus on the people who will use the CRM. For example, instead of thinking of how all administrators will use the system, the evaluation team can ask how their persona, Pat, will use the system – what will Pat have to do to make the system useful and how will the system help Pat.

The example personas, above, are not completely fleshed out, but are intended to serve as a starting point for Extension organizations to create their own. The personas may even prove useful in projects beyond CRM evaluation.

In the next post of this series, I’ll discuss use cases and how they can get you down the path to figuring out what features and capabilities a CRM needs to have to adequately meet your goals and serve your people.

I welcome feedback and questions at stephen.judd@unh.edu 

Previous post: CRM for Extension – Step 0

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CRM for Extension – Step 0

Stephen Judd is serving as the eXtension Foundation Customer Relationship Management Fellow. This post is an update on progress on this funded Fellowship from the USDA-NIFA New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement.

Over half of the Extension organizations, recently surveyed, report considering the adoption of customer relationship management software (CRM). This post will describe the considerations that need to be in place before a CRM evaluation should take place – this is step zero.

CRM is not a goal, outcome, or strategy

CRM is one tool, among many technologies, and is not a goal, outcome, or strategy, in and of itself. Therefore, prior to even evaluating the use of a CRM, the Extension organization needs to have clearly stated goals and objectives. In examining these goals, you should ask yourself, “what strategies do we need to implement to achieve the goal?” Then, ask if CRM is one of the tools that might help you implement the strategy.

If an organization starts considering CRM without identifying how it fits with their strategy, they risk implementing a shiny new technology that creates extra work, with no relevant results.

Example: To better understand our reach: how many people (unique count) do we serve, how do they interact with our programs (do they access offerings from multiple programs/efforts?), and are we serving a representative portion of the population?

This example may lend itself to the use of CRM to aggregate the information about clientele, their participation in events, and their demographic profiles.

Current processes may need to change

Often, implementing a CRM drives changes to existing business processes. It is important to assess your organization’s willingness to change the way it does business before embarking on a CRM evaluation. It is highly unlikely that a successful CRM implementation can be done, without also evaluating and changing your current processes. This requires buy-in from across the organization and participation from a diverse set of stakeholders in the evaluation process. While there is a tendency to view CRM as just another IT tool, its impact will be widespread.

Example: How do you currently register people for your events, or do they just sign-in when they arrive? If you intend to use CRM to track participation, you’ll need to consider how that information will be captured in the system. Does your current registration system have the ability to integrate with other systems, do you need to change registration platforms? Will you use web-based forms to allow registration and bring the data directly into CRM? If you use paper-based registrations, who will enter the data into CRM?

One strategy with CRM implementation is to identify one or two priority areas to address first, and incorporate other processes later. Trying to modify too many business processes at once to fit with the CRM can doom a project to failure and create confusion and frustration.

CRM isn’t free

Even if a CRM is open-source and doesn’t have a licensing fee, it won’t be adopted by your organization without cost. Implementing CRM requires significant time and effort, both by those who support it technically and those who will be interacting with it. Before evaluating CRM, determine the resources your organization is willing to commit to an implementation, in the short-term and long-term. Unlike a business that may see a CRM as a way to increase sales and revenues, most Extension organizations will not be able to quantify monetary gains or savings from a CRM. 

Example costs:

  • Licensing / hosting fees
  • Technical support, configuration, integration, and administration
  • User training
  • Assessing and modifying business processes
  • Communication with internal and external stakeholders

Summary

While CRM is only a tool, it can have a widespread impact on how your organization gets things done. Part of evaluating a CRM is determining how it fits with your organization’s goals, how ready your organization is to change processes, and what your organization is willing to invest for those changes. The evaluation process should involve a diverse set of internal stakeholders who will be impacted to ensure that the impact is understood and that the CRM chosen fits the needs, goals, and capacity of your organization.

It’s probably a good idea to think beyond the Extension organization, as well. Does your university use CRM, or are they considering it? Should you be part of the university’s CRM or independent? These considerations add to the complexity of the process, but thinking about them from the start can avoid potential deadends in the future.

I welcome feedback and questions at stephen.judd@unh.edu 

Previous post: What is Customer Relationship Management and why would Extension care?

Next post: CRM for Extension – Personas

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What is Customer Relationship Management and why would Extension care?

Stephen Judd is serving as the eXtension Foundation Customer Relationship Management Fellow. This post is an update on progress on this funded Fellowship from the USDA-NIFA New Technologies for Agricultural Extension (NTAE) Cooperative Agreement.

CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is used to keep a record of an organization or company’s interactions with a person or business, record information about the person or business, such as, contact information, and share that information with other users. The overall goal of CRM is to increase an organization’s knowledge and understanding of the people they deal with.

In a recent survey (June & July 2019), people (188 responses) from approximately 63 different Extension organizations responded to questions about CRM usage at their organization. When asked about current usage of CRM at their Extension organization, respondents reported 30 currently use CRM, 36 are evaluating using it, and 35 have no plans at this time. The numbers don’t add up to the 63 total organizations, likely because the usage is not uniform across each organization.

I’ll delve into the details of the survey in a later post, but consider that over 45% of the Extension organizations responding report currently using CRM and another 30% are currently evaluating using it. Approximately 20% of the Extension organizations represented indicated they had no plans to use CRM. This would seem to indicate that most Extension organizations perceive some value in the use of CRM.

Where’s the value?

If a company sells widgets, and they implement CRM, and profits or sales increase, then they may be able to attribute the increase to CRM usage. They may track metrics like lead conversion, time to close deals, opportunities won and lost, and more. In Extension, we rarely have similar metrics that we track. The widget company may be able to justify the cost (licenses, support, training) of CRM with the increased sales. Extension may incur similar costs, but since we tend to be less revenue-driven, the benefits may come in less tangible terms.

So if it isn’t, necessarily, about increasing revenue for Extension, what benefit is there? Here are some of the “biggest wins” that survey respondents listed:

  • People / Relationships / Marketing
    • better understand how people are engaging with us
    • streamlined categorization of stakeholders
    • working especially well for our government relations team
    • useful for volunteer management
  • Data
    • allow significant amount of data on individual or company
    • improved security of data
    • collecting info that quickly accessible on our prospects & clients
    • stable and sustainable system for documents, contacts, records
    • merge many lists and platforms into one list
  • Sharing / Consolidation
    • provide access to shared data that once was stored separately
    • consolidation and management of contact data in one place for remote access by multiple admins
    • allows us to track everything in one place
  • Marketing
    • coordinating marketing and public relations with programmatic work
    • data- driven decision making about marketing and ability to use data to describe impact (intro graphics and professional graphics backed up by real-time data)
    • having emails for campaigns to market upcoming programs
    • streamlining our communications, giving a consistent look to all of our email marketing, and quantifying the impact of our communication efforts
  • E-Commerce
    • ability to take payments and no longer need to handle cash/checks at workshops and events
    • leaving behind the “cash” culture in favor of online electronic payments

Given the diversity across Extension organizations and the large number of CRM systems available to choose from, how would one go about the process of evaluating CRM usage for Extension. That will be the thread woven through the subsequent posts in this series. I will forewarn you that there is no cookie-cutter template to pull off the shelf, but there are some guiding principles and processes that can be used.

I welcome feedback and questions at stephen.judd@unh.edu or in the comments section below.

Stephen Judd is serving as a funded eXtension Fellow this year to investigate and report on CRM applications in Cooperative Extension.