Saturday, November 18, 2006

Customer relationship management from Bankwatch

Colin on Bankwatch has written a nice summary of CRM and how it relates to banks: Customer relationship management | Wikipedia

As he says:
The vision for CRM is entirely relevant for Banks, but is way ahead of either capacity to afford, or certainly capacity to implement due to disparate systems.
As Colin talks about in Its not about transactions, its about relationships! CRM can provide better relationships between banks and customers, and this can lead to strong upsell of services over time.

This is the key point as I see it for CRM. For any vendor to be able to help customers feel comfortable across the many different interaction points they have, and the many different call center personnel they may speak to, the vendor needs to provide enough knowledge of the customer's profile for the interaction to go smoothly.

CRM can provide this, as well as ensuring that information across the many disparate systems that contain customer information are easily accessible, and present useful information to the vendor on demand.

Integration of systems is essential, and being able to make a good guess of what is needed from which system, in advance will make any call center worker's job easier. BPM, SOA and CRM together can be very valuable if the technology helps the vendor's user, and doesn't just add more complexity to their job.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't see the concept of BPM, SOA and CRM integration being promoted by consultants yet, but it sounds like a viable approach.

Phil Ayres said...

I'm sure its not a unique view, but pretty much everything that goes into and is produced by many business processes is CRM-owned data. As we chatted about previously, customer data is really central to BPM and decision management, so it seems to make sense to me to be able to have CRM integrated into the BPMS, or at least to do a better job of representing the CRM data models directly in the BPMS. I only say this, as many BPMSs do a terrible job of modeling data in their processes, always needing custom code to integrate some meaningful representation of real data, be it CRM owned or not. CRM as a service in a SOA would make its data (and broader capabilities) accessible to BPM and to use by many other business systems, without needing to duplicate it as so often happens.