How to choose a CRM solution

Benjamin Holtz, Founder & CEO, Green Beacon Solutions LLC


Deciding whether to choose a best-of-breed CRM application or a comprehensive application suite has challenged companies in all industries. There is no single best application strategy for all enterprises; the key element to any CRM solution is designing a solution that fits your business best. Here is a place to start your decision-making process – by dividing your CRM options into two camps: niche, or best-of-breed, players and suite vendors.

Best-of-breed vendors exclusively offer the gamut of CRM tools. Sales Force Automation, Support, Marketing, and increasingly Analytics comprise the breadth of a best-of-breed CRM application. Suite applications address the CRM core, but they also seek to take things a step farther. They may offer extended functionality for financials, order management, inventory management, and eCommerce.

In deciding between a best-of-breed CRM application and a suite solution you must consider the following topics.

User adoption

Rule #1 for any business solution is to identify a solution that fits your business. If your solution negatively impacts the way your company conducts business, you are likely to encounter strong resistance. Consider the user productivity tools being replaced – are there favored features that stand to be replaced by your CRM selection? Will you be able to configure or customize the application to suit their needs?

Best-of-breed applications focus on what they do best, which is CRM. Because of their narrower focus, many best-of-breed applications have had the experience to provide standard configurations or customizations to support specific industries, possibly including your own.

Suite applications extend functionality beyond just CRM. As a result, the application has to be more things to more users. This is not in itself a disadvantage to a suite application, but it is important to consider the additional users who stand to be impacted by the new system.

Legacy systems and integration requirements

Another critical step in evaluating best-of-breed vs. suite application solutions for your business is to consider your existing technology infrastructure. Take stock of your existing systems investments to be integrated with CRM. Ensuring the technology of your chosen solution meshes with your existing IT infrastructure will help minimize implementation and support costs for your project.

Best-of-breed applications weren’t built to do everything, and they know it. A best-of-breed CRM application supports technologies to communicate easily with standard technologies. Across the best-of-breed applications, support for standards such as ODBC, XML, web services, and COM based interfaces hint at the ease of use with which these applications can be connected to your infrastructure. This integration flexibility extends to hosted best-of-breed solutions, the best of which provide a Web-services-based architecture to communicate with your legacy systems.

Solution flexibility

Your business is dynamic; what it needs today is not what it will need in 5 years to survive in a competitive marketplace. Your CRM solution should have this same flexibility.

Best-of-breed applications offer greater solution flexibility. They focus on CRM, leaving other aspects to be serviced by your own selection of business tools and processes. Selecting a best-of-breed CRM application leaves the door open to select a best-in-class point solution (for example, an eCommerce platform) where you feel your business will most benefit from it. Also look for open software architectures that can create opportunities to customize the application to a greater extent than a suite solution can be customized.

By contrast, application suites can give you a broader solution out of the gate if that’s what you need. An application suite may buy you the integration to supported systems, and configuration of these integrated systems can be fairly rapid. However, because of the depth of integration between systems, you might find less flexibility in a suite solution to custom tailor the CRM functionality. Consider the costs of migrating to best-in-class solutions if you were ever to outgrow a suite application.

Competitive edge

Spend your money on solutions that offer competitive advantages. Consider your company’s unique environment. For example, how often do customers interact with the company within a 24-hour time period? Which channels do they use to communicate? Differentiating the desirable features from the must-haves is an important step. It’s best not to compromise when it comes to functionality that will enhance your competitive advantage, installing best-in-class to achieve these results.

Best-of-breed applications are easier to marry with best-in-class applications in other disciplines, such as marketing automation, eCommerce, or inventory management applications. Best-in-class packages may be plugged in to support innovative processes that offer a competitive advantage.

A suite may offer the competitive advantage of reduced implementation time, but make sure it is not limiting your ability to introduce the customizations that will set your business apart.

So what do you do to fit your business?

When evaluating any solution, it’s important to first analyze current and anticipated business requirements, and build a strategy based on these needs. It’s important to obtain the right balance between depth of functionality, product flexibility, and integration costs. By carefully considering your environment and evaluating solutions against realistic benefits, you will ultimately find a solution that meets the needs of your organization while maximizing the company’s financial health.

Best advertising money can buy.

The Best Advertising Money Can Buy
If you're not budgeting for word-of-mouth advertising, your business is probably suffering. Our ad expert offers his tips on generating customer recommendations.

Updated: 12:52 p.m. ET Oct. 12, 2005
The price of making a powerful statement is cheap compared to the cost of ads that don't work. So make a statement that counts. This is the best advertising advice I can give you.

I'm not talking about making a grand and sweeping claim, such as "Lowest prices anywhere. We won't be undersold." No one believes hype anymore. I'm talking about a statement that's bona fide, no loopholes, easy to experience. And it only takes one such statement to put a business over the top. That's why you should designate a percentage of your ad budget to purchase word-of-mouth advertising.

Word-of-mouth is one of the most credible forms of advertising because a person puts their reputation on the line every time they make a recommendation and that person has nothing to gain but the appreciation of those who are listening. What are you doing to make sure your potential ambassadors feel confident enough in your business to recommend it? What are you doing to trigger word-of-mouth?

Here are some tips for generating word-of-mouth:

Word-of-mouth is triggered when a customer experiences something far beyond what was expected. Slightly exceeding their expectations just won't do it. You've got to go above and beyond the call of duty if you want your customers to talk about you.
Don't depend on your staff to trigger word-of-mouth by delivering "exceptional customer experience." Good customer service is sporadic, even in the best establishments. The customer who receives exceptional service today can't be sure their friends will receive the same tomorrow, so even the most well-served are unlikely to put their necks on the line and make a recommendation. Deep down, customers know service comes from an individual, not from an establishment. And even the best people have bad days.
Physical, nonverbal statements are the most dependable in triggering word-of-mouth. These statements can be architectural, kinetic or generous, but they must go far beyond the boundaries of what's normal. If you don't want to be average, why do you insist on being normal? Here are some examples of these statements:
Architectural. The piano store that looks like a huge piano, with black and white keys forming the long awning over the long front porch. The erupting volcano outside the Mirage in Las Vegas. A glass-bottom floor that allows customers to see what's happening on the floor below them. Do you remember when McDonalds began building attached playgrounds to all their restaurants? It's worked like magic for more than 20 years.

Kinetic. The tossing of fresh fish from one employee to another at Pike Place Market in Seattle. The magical, twirling knives of the tableside chefs at Benihana. Kissing the codfish when you get "screeched in" at any pub in Newfoundland. (A screech is a loud and funny ceremony during which non-Newfoundlanders down a shot of cheap rum, repeat some phrases in the local dialect and kiss a codfish. Everyone who visits that wonderful island returns home with a story of being "screeched in.") While it may at first seem like a kinetic word-of-mouth trigger is a violation of #2 above, "Don't depend on your staff. . .," it's really not. A kinetic word-of-mouth trigger is constantly observable by management. It isn't a "customer service" experience delivered privately, one on one.

Generous. Are you willing to become known as the restaurant that allows its guests to select--at no charge--their choice of desserts from an expensive dessert menu? You can cover the hard cost of it in the prices of your entrees and drinks. Flour, butter and sugar are cheap advertising. Are you the jewelry store that's willing to become known for replacing watch batteries at no charge, even when the customer hasn't purchased anything and didn't buy the watch from your store? Word will spread. And watch batteries cost less than any type of advertising.

Architectural, kinetic, generous: These are the flour, butter and sugar of effective word-of-mouth. Will you put these rich ingredients into the mouths of your potential word-of-mouth ambassadors?

Budget to deliver the experience that will trigger word-of-mouth. Sometimes your word-of-mouth budget will be incremental, so that its cost is tied to your customer count. Other times it'll require a capital investment, so that repayment will have to be withheld from your advertising budget over a period of years. The greatest danger isn't in overspending but in under spending. Under spending on a word-of-mouth trigger is like buying a ticket that only takes you halfway to Europe.
Don't promise it in your ads. Although it's tempting to promise the thing you're counting on to trigger word-of-mouth, these promises will only eliminate the possibility of your customers becoming your ambassadors. Why would a customer repeat what you say about yourself in your ads? You must allow your customers to deliver the good news. Don't rob your ambassadors of their moment in the sun.
Roy William's is Entrepreneur.com's "Advertising" columnist and the founder and president of international ad agency Wizard of Ads. Roy is also the author of numerous books on improving your advertising efforts, including The Wizard of Adsand Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads.

Web Analytics Special Report: Understanding the ‘Why’ of Customer Behavior

hough blogs can reveal what customers do, it’s difficult to understand why they behave the way they do. Customer experience management is a complementary approach to Web analytics that reveals the “why” behind the “what,” delivering insights into why customers behave as they do.
Reliable customer insights let an online business shape the Internet experience to maximize brand affinity, conversion and loyalty. Customer experience consists of a complex interaction between the Web site and the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, habits, expectations and social references that the customer brings to the situation. It is not the objective reality of the site that needs to be analyzed, but the subjective reality of the customer — the customer’s perception and interpretation of the site.

To add to this complexity, each site visitor has his personal history, creating many subjective realities for the Web marketer or researcher to understand.

Analyzing non-obtrusive observational data such as sales figures and server logs does not uncover such information. Two common examples come to mind:

· With server log data, it’s tough to determine whether a customer is lingering on a site because of interest or confusion.

· It’s difficult to determine whether a customer abandoned a shopping cart because of registration or the shipping fees.

Without knowing a user’s goals, it’s impossible to interpret whether she achieved them. The most reliable method to capture the customer experience is to have many customers surf the Web pursuing goals, while simultaneously gathering behavioral and subjective data from each individual. For a full picture of the user experience, it is important to examine all the critical aspects, including behavior (e.g., where do users abandon registration?), thoughts (e.g., do users realize they have completed a purchase?) and attitudes (e.g., do users feel the site is trustworthy?).

By combining qualitative data — why did you give up? — with quantitative data — number of page views, navigation path — marketers can gain powerful insight into what changes would improve the experience. Furthermore, iterative testing establishes benchmarks to measure the effect of changes on customer satisfaction.

Thus, customer experience evaluation can reveal:

· Users’ prior expectations (Do customers expect to find a product demo?).

• Users’ behaviors in the context of their intentions (Where do customers who are price-sensitive click first? How do customers use online help and support to resolve questions?).

· Which features will affect your bottom line (Which should be developed first: a more accurate search engine or a faster checkout process?).

· Which features likely will be deal breakers (Will asking for a home phone number prompt registration abandonment?).

· What your competitors offer (What’s working and what isn’t on their site(s)? Should you match a competitor in offering links to an independent research site, or does this distract users?).

· How your site compares with industry benchmarks (How does your site’s search function stack up against other search engines?).

· Whether your site is building and extending your offline brand or detracting from it (e.g., does your online experience increase or decrease brand affinity from before to after the experience?).

· How well your site and your online presence affect conversion and retention (Can people find you on the Web? Do your advertising, partners and your online properties increase their likelihood to buy from you?).

These insights help online businesses decide strategic issues: what to fix, how to fix it, what to fix first and how much to spend.




Bonny Brown is director of research at Keynote Systems, San Mateo, CA, an online business performance management service provider. Her e-mail address is bbrown@keynote.com.

Mobile User Experience

http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/

Great article with some good stats.

Ray talked about the role of trust when selling mobile content. Trust is important because it allows more to be sold. It involves the following…

Access to the service
This includes SMS short codes, camera based codes, mobile searches, web/WAP sites.

Brands are currently wary of implementing ‘Off the page’ services as there is currently consumer mis-trust of ’subscription’ based SMS services (due to past scams).

A high trust solution consists of an initial (normal rate) SMS message to download catalogue of content suitable for the particular phone. i.e. Not all services run on all phones.

Mobile search engines are becoming very popular. Many people are buying this way (they trust the links).

There are big commercial gains for early content providers.

Viral ‘pass on to a friend’ systems are very successful as trust is implicit.

Pre-buy experience
Vendors that give useful information, free previews and the exact price (in correct currency) are the most trusted.

Trust during purchase
Services such as Bango offer a "Best Biller" service where the system automatically finds the best way for the customer to pay based on the network operator/country.

Operator billing has the highest conversion rate. Vodafone UK provides the most successful payment system (for Bango) due to the ease of paying.

5% of people are willing to enter a credit card into the phone. It’s 9% in the States as there is more consumer protection (refund) if things go wrong. This rises to 14% if it’s for a trusted brand.

There’s a huge variation on conversion rate (browsing to buying) across all Bango’s merchants.

Return for more
The browse and buy model is more successful than SMS (46% vs 18%).

Fear of what to do

Find Out What Employees Are Afraid Of
Fear keeps many workers from reaching their full level of commitment and productivity.

by Lior Arussy

Thursday, September 01, 2005
You've tried the motivational speakers who came to deliver another touching story--it had the lasting impact equivalent to the patience of a kindergartner. You've exhausted the skills trainers and delivered a plethora of tools to enhance employee productivity. Still, you sense there is more to the problem than meets the eye. You don't get the sense that your salespeople are selling at their maximum potential. You're not convinced that your service people are truly trying to meet--let alone exceed--customer expectations. A hunch tells you that your employees could do more, if only they had the desire. Although you have provided them with great incentive programs, you're convinced deep down that they are not fully committed.
You're probably right. Your employees are not giving you 110 percent of their efforts. They somehow fall short of your expectations. You are not alone: This is a problem shared by almost any company or employer. The bad news is that it takes more than a motivational speech or the promise of a trip to the Bahamas to get them committed.



Most companies established their relationship with employees on the premise that they will do what they are told in exchange for a salary. This premise captures only a small part of the employees' true capabilities. Under this premise employees will never be fully committed. They will do the bare minimum to get their paycheck. Bottom line, there is no way to pay employees to smile sincerely. They need to want to do it, to actually deliver an authentic experience to customers.

During our research we discovered that many employees do not reach their full level of commitment and productivity because of fear. Employees developed different types of fear during the course of their contact with customers. It is these fears that make them perform in a reluctant fashion, which does not maximize the full potential of their relationship with customers. The fears can be related to price or product, competition, or the nature of the relationship with customers. Employees may act on a fear that the competition is better, or that the price the company charges for the services employees represent is excessive and unjustified. Employees' fears may stem from doubting the value of the product or its ability to perform as promised. When shadowed by fear, employee performance will be minimized and reserved, and will cost the company in unnecessary discounts, lost sales, and diminished loyalty. Often, employees feel that by interacting with customers they lend some of their personal credibility to the interaction. If they lack conviction in the products they represent, they will be reluctant to go all the way to deliver excellence. Employees' fears, doubts, and lack of conviction stand between companies and excellent performance.

Acting on the premise that employees will do what they are being paid to do has brought companies to failure. They took employee conviction for granted, failed to sell their own value proposition to their employees, and then they expected them to believe in the products without any evidence.

To elevate employee performance to the excellence level you seek, you need to redesign your relationship with them to include understanding, and to address their fears. This is at the core of the employee experience, and it has a direct impact on the customer experience. If you do not know what employees are afraid of, if you do not have convincing evidence to ease their fears, no motivational speech or other superficial fix will be successful. After all, if you fail to sell to those on your payroll, how do you expect customers to buy from you?

Lior Arussy is the president of Strativity Group and the author of several books, including his latest, Passionate & Profitable: Why Customer Strategies Fail and 10 Steps to Do Them Right! (John Wiley & Sons, 2005).

Roi from CRM

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nf/20050824/bs_nf/37751

Business executives must start to view customer-relationship management (CRM) technology as a way to drive corporate growth, not cut costs. That is the key adjustment business leaders must make in finding success with CRM products, according to Tom Johnson, a managing director with business-consulting firm BearingPoint. He sees CRM maturing into customer-experience management (CEM), the final shift from art to science.

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CRM as a business strategy is maturing. But it has failed to deliver on many of its ROI promises, in large part, said Johnson, because many users based their ROI projections on budget savings, which means staff cuts. "But CRM is really about driving growth, not cutting costs."

CEM will become the key to customer retention, allowing organizations to mine their customer data to stratify clients according to their value. It will provide service appropriate to that value, identify sales opportunities and manage customer churn to retain the most valuable customers.

But, experts warn, the shift to CEM is not just a matter of plugging in a new technology. Only a few companies are ready for the transition at this point. Those companies have three factors in place to insure a successful transition. They have high-quality customer information. They have a clear business strategy for customer management that is expressed in a comprehensive set of business rules. And they have a single corporate standard CRM or enterprise-resource planning (ERP) strategy that can support CEM analytics.

Silo Mentality

The CEM vision sees consistent customer experience across all channels -- from advertising through sales to support. "If your brand's message is cheap and fast, then you need to be cheap and fast all the time, in every interaction with every customer," said Woody (Woodruff) Driggs, managing partner of Operational CRM at Accenture, a management consulting, technology and outsourcing firm. "If you are high-end, you need to always be high-end."

The problem is that the corporate silos have never disappeared. "CEM starts by getting everyone who is important to the customer experience in a room," said Driggs. "We are constantly amazed to discover how often this is the first time that the key people from marketing, advertising, sales and service have talked to one another about what the customer experience should be."

Without a unified vision, companies confuse customers with inconsistent messages. According to Driggs, the marketing department might be promising service, but the service department got a cost-cutting message two years ago and now puts everyone into what he described as "a call-waiting hell." And to make matters worse, many companies installed their ERP and CRM solutions along those silo walls. That produced a situation in which the corporate Web site is tracked by one technology, sales force effectiveness by another, customer relationships by a third and delivery by yet another.

Thus, what should be a closed loop -- from marketing through sales, fulfillment and service -- instead becomes fragmented. Much of the investment made in attracting and securing customers is wasted when the promised experience, whether fast and cheap or high quality at a higher price, is not fulfilled. Driggs said this causes customers to take their business elsewhere. Even worse from a CEM standpoint, many companies outsource major portions of the customer experience, particularly the support center. In the process, they lose control over how their customers are treated.

Technological Dependence

Another error of too many organizations is putting technology first. "People expect too much from these verticalized versions of CRM or ERP products," said Ian Jacobs, senior analyst at Current Analysis, a company that offers business consulting and analysis services. Customers expect these products to have sophisticated processes built in right out of the box. But all they provide is a template that adds terms that are commonly used in that industry. For instance, they redefine "customer" as "patient" and "tools" as "custom workflows."

Those workflows must be based on the organization's unique business strategy, not on a generic set of procedures supplied by the vendor, said Jacobs. For instance, all companies want to retain customers, but, to most companies, not all customers are of equal value.

Business analysts have to consider key questions in evaluating the best corporate reaction. But what makes a good customer? Is it what that customer is spending today or what that customer could spend in the future? How important is a customer's good will or word-of-mouth recommendation? What customer experience does the company want to provide?

Companies also must assess these questions. What does that mean in terms of marketing, sales and service? How should that experience differ for gold-, silver- and bronze-level customers?

No two companies will answer these questions in the same way. The corporate strategy for customer management must be defined clearly, and all involved parties must agree to the business rules designed to turn theory into practice. In addition, the organization must be ready to map ways to implement those rules consistently across all customer interactions, public statements, advertising and marketing campaigns.

This, in itself, is a major challenge, particularly for large corporations, and especially for companies that outsource major parts of the customer experience. It might appear to be an impossible task without the latest and greatest in technology. But consider the success achieved by McDonald's (NYSE: MCD - news), the past master at managing customer experience worldwide. McDonald's achieved a uniform customer experience, across thousands of franchises worldwide, long before the term CRM had been invented.

Corporate Strategy

Ideally, every interaction with every client should be driven by a corporate strategy and a view of each customer's value to the organization. Every time a sales or service representative answers a prospect call, e-mail or instant message, he or she should know what tier -- gold, silver or bronze -- that client fits, what recent interactions that client had with the enterprise and what that customer might be calling about.

If the customer recently bought a new product, then the sales or service agent should be primed to provide support for that product. If the caller has contacted support recently about a problem, the phone agent should know about that call and what solution was recommended.

If the caller had recently e-mailed sales or service, the company's agent should have that e-mail and any answer on the screen when he or she provides a response. If the customer's recent actions fit a known pattern of others who switched to a competitor, the representative should know that and have a plan of action on the screen based on that customer's value to the company.

While this is only part of the vision of CEM, these scenarios are within the capabilities of the present generation of CRM products from industry leaders such as Siebel (Nasdaq: SEBL - news), Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - news) and SAP (NYSE: SAP - news). But, said BearingPoint's Johnson, several widespread problems have prevented these practices from becoming industry standards:

A lack of defined, repeatable customer-experience scenarios based on customer lifetime value, leading to a one-size-fits-all service and experience.

Failure to listen to customer preferences on cost versus service and what form that service should take.

Loss of control of the customer experience through outsourcing major points of interaction.

Industry consolidation that leaves survivors with multiple, incompatible CRM systems and databases.

In addition to these, companies can fail to manage customer expectations. For instance, if the support center is not equipped to handle e-mails or instant messages in a timely manner and integrate them with phone conversations, then the organization should warn customers or not provide e-mail links to service on its Web site.

Branded Customer Experience

On the technical level, high-performance organizations are moving toward what Accenture's Driggs calls the "branded customer experience." They are doing this in several ways: focusing on the basics of data quality to avoid the garbage-in, garbage-out syndrome; standardizing on one, corporate-wide CRM application; and building an enterprise-wide vision of customer service aligned with corporate strategy and branding into a specific set of rules for data mining and response to customer interactions in that CRM suite.

The first might seem obvious but is a major challenge in CRM, which literally depends on every customer-facing individual in the organization for data. This cannot be solved by expanding the pool of data-entry clerks. Sales people will not provide consistent, quality data at the request of the CIO. It requires enforcement from the top of the organization. Thorough, quality data must be a basic requirement for all customer-facing positions.

Companies should expect resistance and be prepared to demote -- and in extreme cases fire -- those who fail the data-quality test, even if they are among the company's top producers. That is the only way to communicate the overriding importance of quality customer data to the organization.

Application unification is equally important. "Companies have tried putting all their [customer] data [from multiple CRM applications] into a data warehouse," said Driggs. "But we don't get a true 360-degree view."

Maintaining multiple applications becomes impossibly complex when the corporation tries to extend a unified customer view across the organization. Users have to master multiple interfaces -- one to enter data and a second to see results while interacting with customers -- while the complexities of managing and translating multiple data structures guarantees some data loss and prevents anything approaching real-time analysis and response. Without that, improved customer retention is impossible.

With those basics done, leading organizations can start to realize the competitive advantages promised by CRM. However, the next step, CEM, still will elude them. While the leading CRM vendors are moving toward CEM and the experts have hopes for the next versions of their products, the technology still is chasing the vision.

However, said Jacobs of Current Analysis, technology is just the tool, not the solution. "Organizations without strong corporate policies based on an enterprise-wide vision and unified strategy will be in trouble."

With those strategic tools, companies can leverage today's technology to competitive advantage and position themselves to take best advantage of the full CEM technology tomorrow.

Definition of CEM

http://www.kinesis-cem.com/Insights/rewards_of_CEM.html
The Rewards of Customer Experience Management

Just when companies are becoming comfortable with the idea of CRM, a
new term has emerged: customer experience management (CEM). The two
are similar in many ways, not least in that they are both difficult to
define. The premises of CRM and CEM are quite different, however, and
best understood when compared side by side.

The idea behind CRM is that every time a company and a customer
interact, the company learns something about the customer. By
capturing, sharing, analyzing, and acting upon this information,
companies can better manage an individual customer's profitability.

CEM's premise is the reverse. It states that every time a company and
a customer interact, the customer learns something about the company.
Depending upon what is learned from each experience, customers may
alter their behavior in ways that affect their individual
profitability. By managing these experiences, companies can
orchestrate more profitable relationships with their customers.

Next one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_experience_management
Customer experience management

Customer experience management (CEM) is "the process of strategically
managing a customer's entire experience with a product or a company"
(Schmitt, 2003, p. 17).

Next one

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:RyGU3aPjpUQJ:www.optima.hr/dokumenti/Quest%2520%26%2520Ans.pdf+cisco+implementation+nice+cem&hl=en
Q&A About CEM

7 i already have a CRM system. do i need CEM too? if so, why?

The implementation of CRM is a major step toward building a business
with true value for customers. But CRM ends when the interaction with
the customer ends. It is geared toward effective execution on behalf
of the business, and in some sense CRM does indeed foster loyalty;
thus making it is easy to confuse the two. However, while building
loyalty and a strong brand is a by-product of CRM systems, sometimes
it is achieved and sometimes not. CEM is designed specifically for the
purpose of building and maintaining loyalty, and is therefore
considered a strategic solution that complements CRM.

Old-style suburbs returning to rescue city

Old-style suburbs returning to rescue city
By Darren Goodsir Urban Affairs Editor
July 23, 2005
Page Tools




Related
What switches a project to fast track - signals coming up
Forget cul-de-sacs that make walking and driving a navigational drama. Take away large above-ground car parks, closeted communities and sprawling, energy-intensive homes that encourage rich residents to stay behind their doors.

In fact, ditch almost every planning principle that has been in vogue in Sydney for the past 15 years. Tomorrow's neighbourhoods, say the planners who are plotting hundreds of new suburbs for 160,000 people, will draw on features from some of our oldest towns and villages in an effort to bring back life and safety. And they will aim to replace what has become an insular, fortress mentality for many residents.

It is a back-to-the-future policy that aims to re-create village squares amid a mix of developments. Schools would be near shops, and walking encouraged over driving.

The Which Sydney Suburbs Work report, released last week by the Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources, has guidelines for how new towns in the north-west and south-west will function. It notes bad planning, mainly in towns developed in the 1980s near Baulkham Hills. It explains how mistakes will be avoided.

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The State Government has set aside the sites for up to 30 per cent of the 600,000 homes it believes will be needed in the next 25 years. In some cases, the study is breathtaking in its simplicity, demonstrating how the city's recent sprawl - which has been built often with little or no support services - has seen rows of chillingly similar homes, but communities devoid of life and vibrancy.

The absence of proper planning has also promoted crime.

What is needed, the report concludes, is a return to grid-style suburbs, with multi-storey apartments near the town centres and transport links. More traditional homes - but smaller and less energy-consuming than recent houses - would lie beyond the centres.

Jobs, and a mix of home sizes and styles, are also considered essential. This mimics traditional suburbs in the inner and middle ring areas of Sydney.

The report concluded that a swathe of more recently built suburbs were a shambles and socially insular. They lack a mix of residential, retail and commercial services contributing to people needing to travel regularly outside their neighbourhoods.

This robbed suburbs of character and presence, and promoted excessive car use and a decline in the time residents spent communicating with each other.

The premise is that the solution can largely be found in the traditional pattern of suburban development, the report said.

"In many areas, the network of pedestrian and cycle routes, constructed between houses and across parks to facilitate access to shopping, open space and other services, have provided opportunities for crime, and are not safe to use, particularly at night.

"Often, newer suburbs have more open space than older suburbs, however, parks in these areas often tend to be located on difficult to develop, leftover land. They are poorly located, of a lower quality and less accessible."

The reports for the new land release areas have been placed on public exhibition until October 7.

A new Growth Centres Commission has been established to co-ordinate the building of suburbs. The former head of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Alan Cameron, leads the new body. It will also aim to ensure that services and a mix of job, transport and housing styles are developed.