Removing the c from rm...

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve always been a bit uneasy about the ‘Customer’ in CRM. I prefer to view the deployment of CRM technology as a means of bringing about process efficiencies which may, or may not impact the customer. So a good example of a ‘may not’ might be using CRM technology to improve the effectiveness of salespeople. i.e. an organisation might have invested in the latest sales methodology and wants to ensure that the benefits are maintained when the original training is but a distant memory, and encompasses the new working practices within the CRM system. The salespeople are more effective as a result and the company hopefully more profitable, but the customer is unlikely to feel much direct benefit themselves.

In practice most process efficiencies have both customer and non-customer benefits. We have a system going live currently where we’ve spent a lot of time automating and streamlining a range of order management and fulfilment processes. These processes were previously handled by a range of Excel spreadsheets, Access databases and hard copy files, and were time consuming and lengthy. The changes we’ve implemented should improve fulfilment quality, reduce lead times, and require less resource, which should lead to a desirable win/win. The customer gets a higher quality product delivered in less time, and the organisation deploying the technology lowers its costs of fulfilling orders.

I don’t want to dwell on it, and of course it’s not going to change any time soon, but in my line of work I see a lot of people delay introducing potentially highly beneficial technology because they want to get their ‘customer’ strategy sorted first. If we removed the c from rm then perhaps, more people would understand the wider potential of the technology.