Measuring Improvement in Customer Service The use of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress in meeting and exceeding continuous improvement objectives for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is commonplace in many industries. The continuous improvement goals and objectives for the CRM strategies at a company of interest, Cincom Systems, are multifaceted and concentrate on measuring improvements in prospecting, selling and service strategies over time. Cincom uses a benchmarking methodology for creating a baseline of performance, and then continually measures performance gains over time across five core business units.

Analysis of Continuous Improvement Objectives in CRM at Cincom

Cincom Systems is a 43-year-old enterprise software company with approximately 700 employees globally. It has a leadership position in the aerospace and defense, complex manufacturing and outsourcing industries....

The metrics and KPIs that the company uses to measure continuous improvement for their CRM systems include customer retention rates, sales cycle performance, cost of sales, improvements in marketing and selling strategy performance, and the upsell/cross-sell performance across all software suites. All of these metrics are reported on a monthly basis, often integrated into an overarching reporting system that ties back these results to the upper-funnel sales analysis tools the company uses. The intent of this report is tie back all of these continuous improvement objectives to website traffic, spending on direct mail, participation in trade shows, and investments in online marketing programs including extensive content-based marketing programs. All of these factors are use as the basis of a marketing information system that is used for guiding the investments in marketing strategies over time.
The benchmarking of CRM…