The Projected Business Impact of a Customer Relationship Management System

Northern Region Community Services (NRCS) had developed a business case to gain funding for a large corporate change management initiative based on the implementation of a Customer Relationship Management System. Whilst the implementation costs had been tabulated in the business case, the benefits of the program had been projected without any empirical evidence to support the projected bottom line impact.

Following six months and many attempts to gain funding, the Australian ROI Institute (the Institute) was asked to develop a projected impact study to compile and present the information required to assist the funding process. It was considered that the methodology used by the Institute would add significant value to the submission, as it not only fully loads the costs of implementing the program, but it also conservatively converts to monetary value, the potential benefits of the program. The Framework utilises a variety of tools and techniques, which provide, information, statistics, standards and 1,000 approaches to data aggregation. This enables the conversion of soft data to monetary value!

This case study highlighted the many strengths in the lateral evaluation of the many benefits of the ROI process.

For example, some of the benefits included:

• Massive savings of treatment abuse.
• Confidence in the effective use of professional staff time.
• Far more effective management of client records.
• Availability of powerful statistical data on patient trends.

In summary the business case was subsequently modified to show a much higher projected return on investment, with substantial qualitative and quantitative evidence to support the calculation. Funding for the program (approx $9M) was obtained within a fortnight of submission.