CRM organization and its gaps

If you will use this text for publishing or academic pursposes, be so kind to cite the author and source: Alen Gojceta, Banka, 03/2003. Thank you!

The main target of Customer Relationship Management is to provide consistent, yet differentiated, service based on one-to-one principle in all interactions, all functional areas and over all organizational layers to your customers. CRM starts by putting the needs of individual customers at the very center of the overall business strategy.

Mature CRM organizations are those rare that manage to provide an experience of a genuine, consistent and personalized service, simulating one to one relationship with their customers. CRM organizations acquire this kind of “CRM maturity” by a sufficient quantity and quality of collected customer data. They possess information systems that support “intelligent” interaction with a large customer base throughout business systems. Mature CRM organizations gain true acceptance of the corresponding philosophy in all aspects of their business operations including people awareness and adapted processes design. CRM is often emphasized to be a strategy, a business philosophy, rather than an IT solution. However, personalized relationship with each individual from a large customer base is achievable only by use of modern IT solutions. On the other side, it is important to understand that IT is just a part of a successful CRM story.

An often and among the most dangerous mistrusts is that it is enough to purchase a CRM solution to enhance the customer relationship. Well that’s not the whole truth. Data collection is only feasible through a lengthy and carefully designed process. Consistency in managing customer relationships is a matter of internal organization and the degree of the maturity of the related business processes.

Gaps of a CRM organization are caused by lack in managing internal business processes and missing to create a corporate culture that makes CRM an integral part of the organizational ecosystem.

The most common CRM gaps are those coming from the inconsistency of the organization itself. Simply put, they occur when CRM is managed by a separate department or departments within the organization. In such cases there is often no true intrusion of a CRM strategy throughout the organization. The “CRM departments” are usually marketing, sales or a specialized customer relationship (customer care, customer intimacy) department. Relationship with customers is not “painful” in organizational segments that are oriented toward clients by their nature. Problems arise elsewhere.

The obscure guys in the CRM team

Modern organizations often have obscure departments similar to police cells whose job is to identify and sanction “non-complying” customers. Unfortunately, these departments often maintain tradition of methods known from the time of economic system that where common throughout the world, regardless of the political system – the monopoly. One supplier and one attitude towards customers shorten to the phrase “you need us, we possess you anyway.”

The most common business processes that are managed by “anti – CRM departments” are fraud management and collections (collecting accounts receivables). Both business functions often take an integral part of financial and telecommunications industries, known as strong acceptors CRM strategy. What makes the difference between collections and fraud detection processes during the economic monopoly and today, during the era of CRM (open markets), is the starting point of observation of the resulting problem (potential fraud or unpaid obligations). CRM organizations start from exploring reasons of a customer behavior. On the other side, organizations with recurrence of monopolistic behavior begin with the assumption that they are always right, and that customer is the sinner who should be sanctioned.
The basic assumption to the selective and intelligent approach to the potential customer “sins” would be the use of information technologies that are an integral part of modern CRM system. In such scenarios, business intelligence tools can recognize potential fraud or debt. Given the user’s position within the CRM segmentation model, campaign management tools generate different messages (research or warning) or trigger different background processes (e.g. block account). The campaigns are carried by the interactive part of the CRM system, usually contact centers, and the results are forwarded to other departments such as finance or fraud management.

A mature CRM organization will, before marking a customer as a defaulter, check whether it is possible that there is a mistake made by them. They would check whether customer’s transactions where properly processed within the systems. When this is done, they would contact the customer to hear his side of the story, without anticipating the final result. Only after the verification call, the CRM organization will put the “carrot” aside and start threatening with “sticks” in form of activation of different methods of pressure or forced collection. Even when the user is actually “guilty”, CRM organization shall, before starting the “mechanism of force”, try to collaborate with the customer to negotiate a solution of mutual interest.

Comparing advanced CRM organizations that have succeeded in merging CRM philosophy with its own corporate culture and some unsuccessful companies in this regard, significant differences in the resulting relationships with customers can be noticed.
There are two most common reasons: (1) inconsistency in customer relations through the whole organizational structure and (2) the process mismatch.

A bitter experience

Everyday life is full of examples of how the experience in doing business with organizations that invest considerable effort in building advanced customer relationships can turn into a nightmare.

Recently my colleague from a neighbor country described his experience with one of their mobile operators. After he got married, his wife moved to the capitol, where he worked for some time already. When moving she required her bills to be sent to the new address. She notified the operator about her new family name. The change procedure was simple. She could have chosen between different channels of communication: Internet, fax, mail or telephone. She decided to use the Internet option, so she filled the form from the mobile operator’s portal. After a short time, she got a call from the contact center agent who wanted to verify the entries. The changed data appeared on the protected area of the internet portal.

The process was simple and perfectly comfortable. Her mobile operator was gaining credit. Everything was fine until the time when the first bill should have arrived to her new address. It was just not coming to the new destination. After ten days from the standard bill date, the woman decided to take the initiative. She sent an e-mail complaining to the customer care department. Right after, she received an answer that the bill will be sent soon to the new address. In the meantime, she began to receive SMS alerts. The new bill was not coming. After an additional 10 days, she noticed an envelope with the logo of her mobile operator put aside of the mail boxes in her building. She took a look at it, and there was her maiden name which was not located on her new family mailbox. She paid the bill with almost 30 days of delay, when she already started receiving severe threats of service termination. The next month the data was correct. On the envelope was her new family name, but her new account balance was showing properly accrued interest for the “delay” from the previous month.

Us or the client?

It is obvious that the young woman’s mobile operator, despite all the investment in modern infrastructure, was unsuccessful in aligning back-end processes. Collection and the customer service departments where simply not in sync. Detailed insight into such CRM implementation can reveal its false side. All processes that are important to support the CRM strategy arise from the needs of the mobile operator, rather than the needs of its clients. Besides a good contact center application and a convenient customer facing processes, in essence the mobile operator has cared only about itself. As a service provider their major concern was to force the customer to pay. They did not care about finding out who was to blame of the payment mistake, nor they shown effort to connect the logic of user complaints about the bill with the errors in the address directory and the penalty interest. The colleague’s wife remained faithful to the mobile operator despite the sad episode, but not without bitterness.
There are dozens of such examples on the market: a bank that accommodate their clients in leather armchairs at its branches while, on the other hand, they require travelling hundreds of miles from province to the nearest town to raise a loan; or the authorized car service with perfect kindness and state of the art customer processes with employees that forget to mention tax and cost of labor when proposing a service.
If you want to survive in today’s market by being desirable to your customers, then you need CRM, a business strategy which originates from the very top of the organization, merges all departments, and integrates with all channels of customer interaction. It’s a way of thinking embedded in all the pores of an organization, in all of its processes, including knowledge management and human resources, supply chain, partner relationships, as well as “customer punishing” processes such as fraud management and collections.