At the heart of customer relationship management (CRM) is the acquisition and intelligent application of customer knowledge across the organisation to the mutual benefit of both the customer and the business.
New millennium customers are more sophisticated, more demanding and easier to lose.
Having information that profiles a customer`s needs and preferences, and using that information to increase revenue will be the competitive advantage of organisations in the new marketspace.
But just having the information housed within the organisation is not enough. The key to successful CRM is the achievement of the "single view of the customer". Being in this elusive and highly attractive state means that you can pull up a customer entry on your data system, and be able to view all the information your firm has on that customer. Any interaction with that customer is recorded on the system no matter which channel the customer chooses to interact with the company.
If you had a single view of your customer, you would be able to view the technical support ticket he logged with your helpdesk, the list of events he`s been invited to by marketing, his channel preferences for direct communication, what he was billed last month by your finance department and his golfing handicap.
From this information, you would be able to build profiles of your customers that enable your marketing and sales teams to intelligently target groups of customers with customised communication and sales campaigns that hit the right spot. This also gives you the ability to assign expensive people resources to the most profitable customers, while encouraging less profitable customers to make use of electronic channels.
A real nightmare
In reality, most organisations have complex and disparate data systems that are not integrated, not synchronised and the nightmare of any marketer, incomplete and outdated.
To get into this quagmire, companies have gone through a familiar process with regards to customer information. Most start off with customer contact details sitting on a standalone spreadsheet, and progress through the fragmentation of sales people maintaining their own customer lists. They then add the complication of accounting and billing systems that aren`t linked to the sales and marketing bases.
Companies end up with data residing in different areas of the business, owned by different departments, developed in and housed on different technologies, and in various states of accuracy and integrity.
If this daunting situation sounds familiar - you are not alone. Research into the "single view of the customer" by Forrester, shows that while organisations agree that this is highly important (92% of respondents saw the single view of the customer as "very important" or "critical"), only 2% of respondents actually had achieved the single view of the customer. Some 88% said they weren`t even close.
When asked whether they would achieve this in the next two years, 48% said yes, 32% said probably, and the rest said it was unlikely they would achieve this even by 2001.
This is both concerning and comforting. Concerning because the single view of the customer is at the heart of CRM and so few have achieved this. But comforting that if you haven`t got it, you haven`t been left too far behind. Yet.
Achieving a single view of the customer is about changing processes and technologies and the people that manage them. Simply implementing a database and a good front-office application or interface will not deliver unless the business processes are redefined to capture and maintain the information required.
The business processes will not deliver unless the company ethos places emphasis on the value of information.
Key to all of this is the integration of customer channels. Customers today want to choose how they interact with your organisation. The integration of all customer touch-points enables your firm to show one face to the customer, and to gather data that will assist in increasing the value of that customer to your company.
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