Putting the customer back in focus

There’s a saying that goes: ”if you’re not paranoid, you don’t have enough information”. It is derived from the premise, that even when you think you have everything under control, there is probably something you don’t know about which could and will bite you in the backside when you least expect it. Recognise this from your adventures in CRM world?

Sure you do.

Of course, if you lived by this rule, you would never be able to relax again. So you don’t live by this rule.

Ironically though, this saying represents the exact most current challenge that all of us in CRM-land are facing.

The fear of being confronted with something customer related that we don’t know about. How do you have an intelligent conversation with your customer if you don’t have the relevant information?

Rapidly growing organisations or those, for example, with complex product structures or segmented markets, especially those which have fallen behind, are frantically trying to build a business and IT infrastructure that will give them transparency in everything customer related.

It’s a tall order to achieve this in a short space of time. In most industries, at the time of writing, you have to catch up within 3-9 months or you will lose your customers.

It requires vision and excellent knowledge about your business and how your customer experiences it. It involves breaking down the customer information into manageable entities. It means understanding when you need what information.

It requires a very strong, experienced and dedicated team to make this happen.

There is no easy way around it.

Some organisations have the information they need to be able to have an intelligent conversation with their customer, but they don’t know where to find it.  Or worse, they do know where to find it but they don’t know how or they have no access.

That’s what I mean with transparency. How paranoid would you be if you had to find something RIGHT NOW but you were looking for it in a dark room with a small torch?

You would be surprised how many customer facing professionals put up with this every day. Customer information can be so close, yet so far away.

Your CRM, whether you run Oracle Siebel, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SaaS CRM, SAP CRM, Salesforce, another off the shelf software or something you have built yourself, should do exactly this for you:

– create structure and insight; transparency – organise and switch on the light.

And if it doesn’t, get paranoid and take action until it does.