CRM: A Business Imperative

Four perspectives on why business organization needs Customer Relationship Management

Let's try to map the four building blocks that make up a CRM system and its impact to the company as a whole.

Marketing: Find Revenue

Driving marketing campaigns, promotions and PR/branding initiatives aims to generate interest about the company and the products/services we sell. Marketers are being tasked mostly to generate demands in turn bring in business interests (Leads) that becomes part of our sales pipeline. Therefore the CRM function on Marketing should be able to Find potential revenue for the company.

Sales: Generate Revenue

Perceived to be the most important aspect of CRM that brings much needed dollars for the company and keeps the cash flow engine running. Sales team turn sales leads into business transactions where customers decided to make a purchase. No doubt that every salespeople are tasked to Generate revenue through profitable business transactions for the company.

Customer Service: Protect Revenue

Sometimes we call this the "Moment of Truth" as this is where companies should deliver the promise of good after sales service to their customers. A very crucial part of CRM where companies has to ensure that their customers are satisfied and if not, eventually they might lose them and also lost current and future revenue. That is why I consider any Customer Service activities like Contact Centre, Helpdesk, Customer care and Help lines in whatever form is done to Protect much needed Revenue.

Customer Knowledge: Sustain Revenue

Understanding our customer better, their needs and behaviours leads most organization to personalize service and products. Knowing your customers is one thing, understanding them is another as this will also impact the level/type of engagements we do for them. While its proven that having an in depth knowledge about our customer will help us Sustain profitable growth and revenue as we are able to deliver relevant offerings.

Customer Knowledge Framework Series

A Framework to plan, develop and execute Customer Centric Strategy like CRM
The Framework serves as guide to any Customer Centric initiatives like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) aimed in helping organizations to design, develop, build and complement their CRM strategy.
The Customer Knowledge Framework (CKF) aid organizations to build their CRM blueprint thru a methodical approach on identifying key components of the CRM initiative through a more structured thought process.
Each of the CKF elements such as Customer Knowledge Repository (CKR), the Experience Blocks, The Tactics and Innovation Block, Customer Centric Enablers and the Benefits and Measures Layer forms the overall Customers Centric strategy.
The framework as the term goes can be applied to any customer focus endeavour in most business discipline and industries while its main goal is to provide thought process guide in developing and executing CRM strategy.

Figure 1: Customer Knowledge Framework Diagram

Brief Description of the Diagram

The Customer Knowledge Framework (CKF) builds its foundation from Customer Knowledge Repository (CKR) where it contains the aggregation of organizations knowledge that can be structured and unstructured format. The CKR in turn will be used to gain knowledge about the customer and use this to design customer centric initiatives to build long term profitable relationship. Though CKR information may not be limited to Customer information, it may also contain substantial knowledge about the organization's staff and business partners.
CKF heavily promote experience as the key driver to customer relationship therefore any organization can place this as pillars towards their efforts to develop tactics, initiatives and even innovations around customer experience enhancement.
The tactics, initiatives, programs and innovation blocks describes what the organization intends or plans to do to enhance the experience blocks. Consider this as the execution component of the framework.
A very significant part of the framework is the Customer Centric Enablers supporting and enabling the tactics and activities. This provides the inventory of all existing and potential technology and tools that will help organization to simplify, streamline, expedite or enhance the overall delivery of contents/experience to their customers.
The Benefits and Measures Layer provides the incentive on why companies embark on Customer centric activities. The layer also provides the different measure of success including KPIs and Scorecards.

Figure 2: Customer Knowledge Framework (CKF) Elements

Summary

CKF as a comprehensive Framework aids organization to plan, build and execute Customer Centric strategies including Customer Relationship Management.
Enhancing the thought process and promote generation of ideas and innovation are some of the very important contribution of the framework.