In the 2017 national study, Current Business Engagement Practices under WIOA, between 60 to 72 percent of surveyed workforce boards, AJCCs, education institutions and economic development organizations reported that businesses are not giving them the buy-in to move their mandates forward. Why? The top two challenges articulated across these target audiences are coordination of business engagement and measuring business engagement outcomes. While these organizations are turning toward Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms to solve these issues, technology is not a magic bullet and it can be an expensive and wasteful endeavor due to low adoption rates. Why do organizations give up on using CRM platforms even with substantial investments have been made?
First, the right platform has to be selected. CRM has been widely used in the private sector to track sales opportunities and to manage relationships and the sales process. There are hundreds of CRM tools in the market that collect customer and sales data to meet these requirements. However, workforce and educational organizations have a unique set of requirements that are not based on sales such as partnering with employers in sector strategies, matching students to work-based learning opportunities, tracking grants and funders’ performance measures, and engaging employers as a customer of government-funded services.
Private sector CRM tools are built as “one-size fits all” and are not specifically developed to meet the nuances of workforce and education business engagement objectives. While these private sector tools can be customized, they are modular-based, making them expensive to configure, and often, they only provide cloud-based solutions that may not meet the security needs of government.
Additionally, to obtain high adoption rates, the CRM must be configured to break down barriers that are typically experienced by workforce and education organizations such as fear of sharing contacts.
Lastly, training is critical to high adoption rates, but not just “point and click” training on the functionality of the platform, but making connections for the users as to how the platform improves efficiencies and why it should be used to fulfill any requirements the user experiences during daily operations. Training should be spread over time to give users the opportunity to use the platform slowly and build her/his skill sets daily.
How do you evaluate these various CRM platforms? Business U’s CRM Assessment Guide is a great place to start. Contact us for more information.
Comments