In this line of web work, there are a few perennial topics that come back at regular intervals. Among them is the subject of interns. Indeed, for many companies still, the Internet and new technologies are children’s toys. So who can work miracles in this field for next to nothing: the young people of Generation Y (you know, all those under thirty who are IT experts and viral marketing specialists because they’re on Facebook all day long).
Personally, I don’t entrust my vehicle for repair to the first person who comes along on the pretext that they’ve been driving a car for 25 years, but be that as it may: let’s talk about the substance.
“I think I’m going to entrust that to an intern”
2012 was no exception to the rule: barely recovered from New Year’s Eve, we set to work on the CRM project of an industrial client (yes, I know, it’s not exactly the same thing as the Web, but not for the client…). After two 2-hour sessions and the usual preparation work, the conclusion comes: “in the end, I think I’m going to have an intern do it.” Have we explained it so well that it seems too simple to be worth paying for?
One can already question the wisdom of entrusting one’s image on the web to an inexperienced beginner with no supervision (an intern, then). But going so far as to have them implement customer relationship management is a mystery to me. After all, what is it about? Sales productivity. So yes, in times of crisis, spending money in order to invest is no easy thing. But it is also, more than ever, the time to give yourself the means to be better than the competition to keep your customers and find new ones. And that is where implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) approach often proves very useful.
“Let’s make the same mistakes all over again”
But what will our brave intern do? He will take the company’s Excel customer file. He will choose an OpenSource tool at random based on his knowledge (necessarily limited), and he will recreate the same structure in order to then migrate the data easily. Where it would be necessary to analyze the sales process to improve it, automate certain tasks, share information better and simplify reporting, we are going to repeat the mistakes of the past, with no consideration whatsoever for the future of the tool. The intern will leave, the salespeople will not use the system, and all of this will end up forgotten, for lack of maintenance and change management support. 1 year later, everyone will have gone back to their good old personal Excel file to track their customers.
Well, I’ll leave you now, the neighbor’s son is doing his 9th-grade work experience at a dentist’s, I’ve got a cavity for him to treat.
