Success and failure with CRM – Resistance to the new

When implementing a CRM strategy is fundamental to review how your organization is working. The main subject to focus on will always be the customer. We will want to check each sector and think how do customers relate to it, what do they bring and what do the organization give in return, how to improve this, and so on.

I’m sure most of this analysis will bring suggestions and new ideas to do changes in your processes and how do you work (how do you record meetings, phone calls, emails) and even in the way we communicate with customers (implementation of quality service surveys, additional personal information records). It is only logical that most of this changes will be faced with resistance from many of your organization team members.

This is why is very fundamental to always consider the major human factor always present in any project. One of the success factor in any CRM project will be tied to our skills to put teams on our side. If we are successful in including them with the attention they deserve, making them part of the project, always making training tools available to them, we will be able to mitigate this risk and shrink it to the point where it is manageable.

Resistance to change, the new (and fear) are feelings deeply tied to the fact of being human that we will not be able to completely eliminate. But when you consider this as challenges part of the project we will be able to have much more probabilities to end up with a successful CRM project implementation.

About the iPad (and why I love it)

Today I got my iPad. I’m really excited about it. I know this launch has received a lot of coverage on the media, but for me this is not just about a product. This is about a platform.
Many of you would think that “the iPad is just a large iPod Touch”, that’s nothing revolutionary about it. But when you think about the device and the platform as a whole new thing, you will see it all differently.
It is true that touch interfaces aren’t new: the iPod exists now for almost four years in the market. But one thing is a touch interface in a mobile phone, and something totally different is when you think about a mobile computing device. The things that you can do with this are tremendous! Think about just some applications to come: sales force automation, mobile technical support, e-learning, business intelligence. All are just like brand new in the light of a touch interface. All of those applications that are just normal on a PC are totally transformed by the touch interface.
Maybe it is because the “surprise” about touch interfaces was spoiled a few years ago with the iPhone, but I do think that this is completely new, and is going to change things in a lot of ways yet to imagine. So here I am, starting to compile my first projects on the iPad and trying to see how things work on it.
Is not that I enjoy products from a company (let this be Microsoft or Apple or whatever), I enjoy technology itself, and for the things that enables me to do. Just thinking about the years to come makes me so excited, and I can’t wait to be a part of it.

Uh oh, Apple released new MacBook Pros!

Following the story about my new notebook, that I bought just five days ago, it seems I should have waited! Apple just released new specs for all MacBook Pros, and they’re upgrading pretty much everything!

The processor is faster (2.4 GHz compared to 2.26 GHz), they have more RAM (4 GB compared to 2 GB, that’s twice the memory!), the hard drive is larger (250 GB compared to 160 GB) and the video chip is better (NVidia GeForce 320M compared to the NVidia GeForce 9400M). It seems to me this is the machine it should get!

Now, Apple has a 14-day return policy, but they have this little nasty thing they called “return fee”, if you opened the box, you get like 120 dollars less when returning the hardware. I guess that help them cover the cost of testing the machine and maybe repacking it to be sold as refurbished. The thing is, if I would have know that they were to release new machines, I wouldn’t have opened it! But having just called to the Apple Store, they told me (and I remember I read something about it somewhere…) that being the case that they made the change in their hardware specs, they won’t charge me with the return fee, and that I will get a new machine, no cost!

This is why I like Apple so much: they really have reasonable policies when dealing with this kind of incidents. So I have to keep calling the Apple Store to see when they will have the new models in stock, and get it exchanged.

If you have the case of being trapped in such a situation sometime (having just bought a new machine, and knowing about a new release two or three weeks after your purchase) don’t hesitate to call or visit your Apple Store and talk to them so you can get your new hardware