CRM Composition

My point of view in the last blog was that CRM today consists of 3 pieces, customer experience management (CEM), customer management and the technology platform. This view provides some level of organization in an industry that covers a wide range of components, philosophies, technologies, etc. This view also helps businesses put their arms around the scope of CRM whether in their business or external review.

CEM is broad in itself. For example questions that should be asked: are customers empowered to help themselves when they need information?; can customers contact a business by the channel of their choice?; when a customer calls a business they know that that customer got an email from us earlier in the day?; do we continually exceed our service goals? CEM is an industry in itself and an outgrowth of CRM.

Customer management has become more important because of privacy liabilities. For example, does your company have a CRM strategy and vision in place in the first place? This would be the guiding light to ensuring that all legal and regulatory needs are being met. Do you have a CRM focused organization in place? Who is managing the VOC? Is there a Chief Customer executive? Do you know your customer's ROI?

If you answer no then how do you design an effective CRM campaign emulating from an approved and supported strategy? Any organization that has implemented or is thinking of implementing a CRM capability needs to have a governance structure in place so that privacy is protected, opt-in/out requests are honored, and so that product marketing is appropriate and allowed. Finally, have you enabled communication between customers, employees and even prospects? This social media opportunity requires a large amount of customer management in order to protect privacy and data.

The platform is the third piece of my point of view on CRM. The platform or enabler needs to be selected and sized based on business opportunity and ultimately the ROI. The platform needs to fit the business model so that it becomes seamless to business operations while providing enhanced customer interactions.In many cases when CRM capabilities fail it is because the capability was not designed based on end user input. In order for users to embrace CRM they really need to feel like the system was build just for them. They need to see and understand that the system will make their life better in some way, whether financially or operationally.

When deciding to implement or evolve a CRM capability a business should look at CRM in three pieces, experience management, customer management and technology platform. This will ensure that all pieces are considered and that there is an understanding to what it will take to create a capability that will meet current and future needs.

In following blog posts I will dig more deeply into each of these CRM components.