Putting the customer back in focus

CRM is all about matching what is in the head of your customer in your CRM architecture. You need to be able to get to the right customer data when you need it.

This could be information regarding quotations, orders, complaints. service outages, moves, contact persons just to name a few. Phew….

I was joking the other day with a friend of mine how great it would be if you could just teleport the information in your customer’s head into your own CRM databases. All information about ongoing orders, quotations, previous conversations, the customer’s likes and dislikes, his perception of sales conversations, the way he felt when your order was delivered.

Just like that. Teleportation of customer data. Break it down on one end, build it back up in the other.

Now we all know this is not possible. But it’s a good end-point vision. After all, if we had all customer data available at our fingertips, an intelligent conversation with the customer would be relatively easy. There would be opportunity for upsell of other products, there would be opportunity to anticipate the customer’s wishes and surprise instead of disappoint.

The tools we have are not teleportation, but they are today’s CRM architectures which we have to maximise to their potential by making sure we catch all the information in data entities as and when they happen. If a customer sends an email or phones in, log this as a communication object in the customer object. If a customer places an order, log the order in the customer object. If the customer changes their mind and changes the order, log the communication and update the order in a new version. Keep a track record of anything that happens related to your customer and organise it so that you can get to everything.

The key lies in breaking it down into logical entities that suit your business processes and that can be presented to a user so that it matches your customer’s thinking patterns during interaction with your organisation.

Building up your 360 degree customer overview step by step, registering history consistently as it takes place, is not quite as satisfying as instant teleportation, but it will deliver the ability to meet and exceed the customer’s expectation when it counts.

The choice of course is yours – start building and perfecting and creating an infrastructure to build customer intelligence or wait for technology to deliver ‘mind to machine-type’ teleportation.

But that’ll be the time of many other technological breakthroughs.

Cyberspace hologramming, skyping with tourists on Mars, and business blogs that write and publish themselves.