CRM gets strategic

After suffering the slings and arrows of Gartner and others who questioned its value in early 2003, it looks as if CRM is coming back with a vengeance — due in large part to the enterprise’s unprecedented rediscovery of that always distasteful creature: the customer.

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Grudgingly acknowledged as a necessary evil, the customer has been, at least until now, always considered a pain in the neck. Historically, enterprises have been focused on back-office, manufacturing, and various other internal processes.

But according to Kevin Nix, group vice president and general manager of CRM solutions at Siebel, executives suddenly want to look at their companies from the perspective of their customers. “The ‘ah-ha’ is that companies want to be customer-driven enterprises,” he says.

But what does customer-driven really mean? And more importantly, what does the term mean for IT?

Today’s executives want their employees to put themselves into the mind-set of a customer, whether that customer is phoning a call center, walking into a branch office, or maintaining a relationship with one store. If a longtime customer makes a purchase through another channel — whether brick and mortar, Web, or wireless — executives want the new store to know who that customer is. 

What sounds like a simple idea to sales and marketing can be a huge challenge to IT, however. For example, suppose one sales channel breaks down. How do you move the customer to another channel before he or she abandons your Web site, your store, or your inbound call center?

The truth is, the more you gear your IT processes to the way your customer wants to do business with you (and not the other way around), the more loyal your customer will be. That’s the big idea currently rippling across the enterprise.

I spoke with Lorne Wilson, vice president of sales and marketing at Fujitsu America, where CRM has moved well beyond SFA and sales management. Not only can Fujitsu tailor and segment promotions and sales efforts to separate slices of its customer database, but it can also “feed the factory,” as Wilson puts it. 

“We can map out trends to understand what products are growing, declining, or stable [in sales], in order to pipeline the proper product mix to our component manufacturers,” Wilson says.

Neoforma, an SCM (supply-chain management) company, uses Salesforce.com to document customer issues. Because it tracks product defects and enhancement requests, it can automatically route them to its engineers to aid in product design.

Yet, CRM systems rarely hold all the information you and your customers want. They just add a layer describing customer needs and preferences in order to make data found in financials, SCM, manufacturing, and other systems more meaningful.

During the past year, a number of solutions have bubbled up to help businesses make the most of CRM. Siebel’s UAN (Universal Application Network), Salesforce.com’s Sforce, and SAP’s Master Data Management all promise to synchronize customer data with other systems.

But obviously, if you want your customers to have a 360-degree view of their relationships with your company and vice versa, a great deal of integration work will be required. As your company decides that it too wants to be customer-driven, my advice to you as IT professionals is, you’d best get with the program.