Many organizations claim to be customer centric because they have a piece of CRM technology that handles the interactions they have with their customers. Creating a truly customer-centric organization is a far greater challenge, and organizations need to take a different approach to how they orient themselves around their customers in order to achieve it.

It has been all too common in recent years to view CRM software as just another component of an organization's IT architecture. But the relationship a company has with its customers affects almost every area of the business. As such, CRM should be an intelligent and dynamic layer that becomes the main interface between the organization, its systems and people, and the customer. Many current innovations in CRM technology now consider factors like customer experience and engagement, rather than purely product or service, and processes play a key role in bringing these factors together to achieve customer centricity.

In CRM, processes are everywhere-not just within the organization. When customers contact a website, an IVR, or a call center agent, they are engaged in a process with a goal. An effective CRM solution needs to be oriented around embracing the customers' processes and goals rather than around the system, department, or information islands that underpin them.

Enriching the data

In order to achieve this, organizations need to be able to make use of the relevant data stored in their systems. This includes both interaction data and transactional data.

Typically, interaction data comes from the telephony, website, and channel-centered systems, with limited visibility as to the outcomes and work completed during the contact. Transactional data tends to be rooted in the core systems of record, and that often results in an inability to get a meaningful view of how these two data sources connect.

While many companies track transactional data, and some track interaction data, most are not doing enough to combine the two.

Using a process-based platform, both interaction and transactional data can be easily accessed and combined, providing far more insight into the customer, as well as enabling more meaningful performance measurements and making it easier to identify target areas for improvement. The process may span multiple interactions and touch multiple processes or transactions. By tracking finely-grained process execution and performance, the interaction and transactional records can not only be combined, but also can be used to harness and expose organizational intelligence that has more meaningful context.

The richness of data enables the point of interaction to be more dynamic to the context of the customer's activity and goals. For a call center agent, this represents a single view of the customer-not a merged data record, but a picture of interaction and transaction together, and a real-time context for serving a customer's need. Such a detailed picture can help agents determine when and how to introduce upsell or other value-added elements within the course of a contact.

Implementing a process approach

When looking to adopt a process-based approach to CRM, everything must begin with the customer. The customer's perception of which processes are important and how to enhance their experience may well differ from the organization's perception. All process-based approaches need to embrace stakeholders and should begin with workshops that state the goal or mission of the project and then use broad, multidisciplinary, and stakeholder perspectives to determine leaner, more relevant processes that support the customer experience.

The key is then to break the project into bite-size chunks and to deliver focused business value and experience improvements in short steps, using a platform approach.

Taking a process approach to CRM encourages and enables companies to design their customer interaction scenarios with the customer as the primary actor each time. What is the customer's goal? What is important to them? How do they measure success or a good experience? The process approach is all about designing innovative business scenarios that truly puts the customer at the center.

About the Author: Steven Thurlow is the chief technical officer at Sword ciboodle