Building blocks for customer interaction

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: Human relationships, be it personal or professional are a result of summation of experiences over a period of time. Great experiences are built on the quality and effectiveness of interactions and communication between two partners. In a business context to develop better relationship with customers, or in another words, to have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in place, companies must focus on delivering consistently great customer experience. Towards the above it is crucial that companies must be committed to learn about unique needs of the customer, during each interaction, assimilate that knowledge throughout the enterprise, enable real-time access to customer information to all the key stake holders of the enterprise. Customer Interaction Management (CIM) makes the above a reality and is the fundamental building block for a good CRM system.

Traditional CRM approaches focused on implementing parts of the customer life cycle management applications like Sales Force Automation (SFA), Call Center, Campaign Management and so on. While they achieved automation in some of the above customer facing processes, they failed in adopting a holistic “customer centric “ approach. They ended up creating “silos” of customer information—enterprises had “splintered” view of their customers and customers had “splintered” view of the enterprises, so much so that customers almost concluded that enterprises suffered from “Corporate Amnesia. “Moreover the above CRM systems were developed with the conventional channels of communication like “face to face”, phone and so on. They did very little to exploit the new channels of communication like email, chat, that were created with the advent of the internet. Even if enterprises adopted some of these channels of communication like email management it was implemented more as a standalone system with no integration to the CRM. This was also of one of the reasons for a lot of CRM implementations to fail to deliver on the promise because they lacked “customer centricity”.