Crm Ð'- Connecting

CRM Ð'- Connecting

People and Business with Information

In order to increase the customer base, according to Dr Martha Rogers

(Peppers & Rogers), "We're going to use information about customer to make each customer more valuable to the company, and we do that by making the company more valuable to each customer". Assuming we are offering the right product and service, we must be able to deliver value to the customer, and this must be done in a way that brings value to our business. This can be enabling by using information to direct the right products and services at the right customers at the right time. It is a two way interaction, where we are trying to communicate messages to our customers and, at the same time, trying to capture useful information about them back.

The current revolution in financial service and customer relationship management (CRM) is as much about changing characteristics of customer communication than anything else here we look at the characteristics of the connection and why so much is changing.

Information is the Main Ingredient

The raw material of the customer relationship is information and the workings of the relationship manifest themselves in how we transact that information. There is information about the customer that, if know by the bank, can provide us with better insight to define a more targeted customer strategy. It is important that we can capture this is customer information effectively and organize it in a way that allows us to understand it, and leverage it later.

There is information describing our own business such as that describing our own business such as that describing our products and services, the actual customer portfolio and transaction history administered in the back office, the general market that we interact with and that affects our business. All of this needs to be managed in an integrated way.

There is no doubt that huge amount of effort are expended by people looking for, analysing and presenting information that is there, but is difficult to access. There are benefits of having better collaboration between people, shared (collective) memory, information history and accessibility. What we want is to get all out of people's heads, personal system and way that allows everybody to access it, retrieve it and, further, to work and manipulate it in a way that gives value.

So, to enhance our ability to transact (transmit and receive) information with our customer and markets we must implement a properly structured and integrated information model. CRM and related technology provides the means tools and information model. CRM and related technology provides the (valuable) information underpinning the business of the bank the integrated information model, when implemented, provides the foundation upon which the visible processes of the bank can be managed. There is little point in having usable, well presented front end application (web applications, point of sale, graphics), if the information they capture or retrieve has no central home.

Moving the information around

Communicating with the customer require us to take information from our information from our information repository, organize (transform) it and present it in a way that maximises the likelihood that the customer will really take the message on board. The essence of our business model involves many people executive many processes (actions) to serve the needs of customer and other (internal and external) stakeholders. These processes are, in effect, pushing information around.

When customers make the connection, they are looking for some action or services to be performed by the bank whether initiating a financial transaction, requesting information or registering a complaint, the bank must try to anticipate the request, cater for it through the customer's choice of communication channel and provide the means to manage the request to fulfillment as efficiently as possible. The current business and CRM `

When customers make the connection, they are looking for some action or service to be performed by the bank. Whether initiating a financial transaction, requesting information or registering a complaint, the bank must try to anticipate the request, cater for it through the customer's choice of communication channel and provide the means to manage the request to fulfillment as efficiently as possible. The current business and CRM evolution is focused on providing the applications, tools and infrastructure to enable these processes. For efficiency and cost effectiveness, everything must happen speedily, and expending the lest time, money and effort. The technology is both a ) making new communication/ transaction channels possible and b) freeing up and Supporting scarce human resources to carry out less frequent, but more value added customer facing activity.

Communications and the work required to complete them can occur at anytime of the day. Twenty-four-hour contact/ service centres and on-line banking services are ensuring that such services can be effectively provided by the bank or managed by the customer themselves the challenge is to provide as much service as possible through these channels and fully automated channels to be highly structured to allow the requested services to be completely fulfilled. Whether a customer is managing the channel (self service) or an employee, the user interface must be, and is becoming more and more intuitive.

Flexible and powerful. Making things simple and flexible for the user requires. Conversely, greater sophistication in the underlying tools and applications.

All of these multiple channel and related application are working with the same information. It is a common mistake for organizations to deal with such initiatives separately, to the point that the value in a single (logical) structured information model in the centre is missed.

If the bank can implement such a single repository, and there is no good reason why not, them implementing multiple fronts (customer and employee facing) application later is much more straightforward.

Many Technologies Ð'- Many Enables

There are many technologies, applications, database, tools and systems. Some are entirely new, while others replace the legacy, and yet other wrap around or integrate with the legacy. The technology can provide a real win-win. On Ð'-line banking is not only demanded by customers, it also provides real benefits to the bank and how it delivers services. Form the bank's perspective