CRM Climbs to Higher Ground

The customer may be king, but somewhere between rhetoric and reality, most organizations have discovered that courting and keeping customers is a royal pain. Over the last decade, global competition, downward pressure on profit margins, and easy access to product information and pricing for competitors and consumers have made it increasingly difficult for companies to achieve that goal.

As a result, many organizations have turned to customer relationship management (CRM) systems not only to provide a technology foundation and business framework for managing complex tasks and to help them become more efficient and profitable, but also to maintain customer loyalty. Unfortunately, on their road to CRM success, they have often taken a few detours. "Too often, organizations haven't connected data to real-world practices," says Greg Comrie, senior vice president of solutions delivery at AGSI, a consulting firm headquartered in Atlanta.

To avoid that problem, many companies are combining the operational and analytic sides of CRM to create a more sophisticated and holistic view of the enterprise. The two aspects traditionally have been used separately; the operational side relies on call centers and sales force automation (SFA) while analytics taps into existing business data. But together they're ushering in new opportunities and possibilities for predictive modeling, cross-selling, marketing and more.

"Over the last decade, organizations have become so focused on technology and systems that they have lost sight of the customer orientation and how to achieve their goals," says Gareth Herschel, research director in the Atlanta office of IT consulting firm Gartner Inc. "The focus is now moving toward an integrated organizational approach. The goal isn't only to improve efficiency and save money for the enterprise but deliver benefits to the customer."

Today's CRM encompasses the entire enterprise, from the warehouse to the finance department. Challenges abound, such as determining how to extract the right data, how to use it to maximum advantage and how to put concepts into action on the front lines of business. Although there's no simple solution, a growing number of organizations are learning that an integrated and orchestrated approach can pay dividends.