The People Factor

Customer Relationship Management has an essential factor, the people factor. That is why, when talking about CRM, we cannot only talk about the management and strategy, the goal and objectives, other things such as technology, people, process, collaboration, culture should be talked and they all have to be blended and mixed together.

The people factor is one of the toughest factor, which I think it is also the driver of CRM. People means everybody involves in this CRM thing. How big is that?!  The success is more or less on average, it cannot be either very satisfying or very poor. People is a subjective thing, which makes the inheritence can be said as subjective as well. Anyway, in business world, everything can be expected to be done and measured. As more business people see CRM as an important thing in doing business, then the people factor should be more understand, aware, and knowledgeable about CRM. Then, what’s next?…

Collaborative CRM

CRM or customer relationship management is a strategic management approach to maintain relationship with customers. It is divided into several categories; operational CRM, analytical CRM, collaborative CRM. Some research mention about e-commerce CRM and mobile CRM as well. Operational CRM is front-office CRM to improve customer service. Analytical CRM is intended to analyze customers data, usually requires data warehouse and data mining in finding patterns or reveal data that is useful in gaining and maintaining customers. Collaborative CRM is CRM approach intended to optimize communication between customers and company. Usually it provides various channels as customer’s contact points. They can choose the most convinient way in interacting with company.

Collaborative CRM is interesting in some ways. What is the collaborative? Why is it collaborative? CRM is about customers-company relationship. Customers can have many meanings such as direct consumers, suppliers, agents, distributors, or whoever which has business relation with the company. We can call it customers. What kind of collaboration can it be? How would they gonna do that? What are the issues in implementing collaborative CRM? What are the CSF of implementing it?

Social software and CRM

I just think about this topic since yesterday. I’m thinking that one core business process is managing customer service, to do that, organizations can use CRM. I see CRM as a whole process from front-end until back-end system. Is that true? Then, the adoption of social software is also able to be used internally and externally. Hmm, maybe the external usage is interesting. Because I assume that external party is more unpredictable than insiders, which are employees of organizations. If it is possible, social software adoption can be used as front end application to communicate and interact with customers, then it integrates with other system in organization to finally process the end result; reports, forecasting, sales dashboard, etc. The results might depend on customers’ participations in the front end system. Well, it’s kinda interesting though, then I can add more things inside later.