Integral customerview & CRM

Management and staff in many organisations still don't work well (usually unintentionally) as a team. Customers are the ones who suffer, getting transferred from one person to another when they ring with a problem until they either give up or eventually end up with somebody who knows the answer. Clearly organisations are changing and the idea that the customer should play a central role is slowly being accepted but the existing rules on who is allowed to decide what and the way in which the computer "applications" work makes this almost impossible to realise. The computer applications were often built or bought as stand-alone systems and do not easily support the concept of "processes", leaving the staff and management without a clear view of events and the customer with a fragmented solution. The solution lies in the implementation of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to give an integrated customer view.

Using a CRM System we can actually ensure that we create a customer centric organisation, by (partly) changing the way that the organisation works. Front-office staff, analysts and management can actually achieve an integrated customer view, because the data and information from various different systems is cleaned and collected in one place. Using this integrated customer view the whole organisation is better able to give the customer the type of service that they want, which increases revenues and customer retention.

 When designing a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM) it is import to take account of the following considerations:

• Definition of the CRM goal(s): What are we trying to achieve with a CRM? Who are the users? What sort of information do they need?
• The front-office set-up;
• The definition of "the customer" (who and what is the customer?) including the removal of duplicates, both organisations and people;
• The collection of the various customer details from all the different back-office systems;
• Definition of the necessary infrastructure for the CRM system (type of database, datawarehouse, data integration);
• Definition of the so called "vertical markets" to allow customer segmentation and cross-selling; 
• Definition of the essential customer performance indicators e.g. customer loyalty, number of customers, value of customers, customer churn etc. 
• The realisation of the necessary market research, choice of product and a proof of concept;
• The setting up of both a user and a support organisation.

Using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) the organisation realises an integrated customer view giving the possibility to increase revenue and customer retention in a structured and repeatable way.