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Customer Relationship - Maturity Model

August 2014

Source Video:

http://www.ventanaresearch.com/webinars/CRM/webinar_replay/index.aspx?id=2596

Research based of 150 companies

The maturity of the organisation was examined from the perspective of its

People

Processes

Information

Technology

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Research findings shows that 44% of companies surveyed still treat Customer Relationships in the

same way as they have done for years as a tactical strategy, and see no reason to change.

Figure 1.1 - Relationship ranking of companies surveyed

Figure 1.1 goes on to say that this does not say these companies are right or wrong, but the research

shows that more 50% of companies surveyed have started to adopt more innovative processes

people and technologies to help them build better customer relationships. It showed that 12% could

be seen as innovative as they use the latest techniques, people, processes and technologies and

have trained and incentivised their employees to use these.

Breaking these findings down into the four components of innovation you can see the Innovative

group seem to be focusing efforts on process innovation (in red) than are the other three groups.

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Figure 1.2 – Areas of Innovation effort by group

In conjunction with a series of survey questionnaires the companies were surveyed as to their

Customer focus. Whilst all considered themselves to be customer focused, the Innovative group had

the highest ranking in relation to the specifics of Customer relations than all other groups.

Figure 1.3 – Customer focused ranking by group

This demonstrated there was a strong relationship between innovation and being truly customer

focused.

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The research also shows the more mature companies use a cross functional team reporting to the

senior management who are responsible for the consistence of service through each of the business

units. 19% used a cross functional team another 19% used a single individual.

Creating a single view of customer, not with silo’s of information retained in separate business

functions, organisations can easily have 20 plus systems managing customer data, and the logistics,

costs and resources required to manage that across the enterprise is a struggle for most companies.

The consequence is of course that organizations are at risk of giving the customer inconsistent

quality and content of services as they interact with the organization through different channels.

The second challenge for organizations is to be able to provide personalisation of services.

Customers are individuals and expect to be treated as such, and with the technologies available in

this day, the experiences of being provided with personalized service by other companies has

created expectations of minimum levels of service that your customers will expect to receive. This

trend has continued through 2012 to 2015 to the point where personalized service is today no

longer a competitive point of differentiation, but “table stakes” for customer recruitment, product

or service selection and customer retention. Further these expectations are in themselves also

changing as the more progressive companies seek to create further efficiencies through continuous

improvement, and will continue to refine and improve customer loyalty.

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State of Customer Relationship Maturity

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Pulling these 3 together to give personalized services

Most highly used is interaction handling processes (78%).

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To provide effective services the company needs accurate, and up to date information behind any

interaction with the customer.

Today it’s not enough for CRM to be a shared pool of interaction and informational and transactional

data. The notion of “one view” of the customer emerged in the late-1990s was based on the

assumption that workers can and would choose to access databases to gain insights while providing

service which in today’s environment where customer service expectations are higher and there are

more technologically enabled touch points we know to be a flawed assumption. To leverage

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technology and empower workers the analysis must be done prior to the customers contact, so the

customers, workers and the technology based systems can leverage accepted organizational

assumptions and norms presented information, manage processes and interactions to maintain high

levels of customer service. In practice this could be as simple as icons and indicators to explain

status or head off frustration that are presented to the customer on line or to the call centre

operator in a clear and cognitive manner. Data analytics is used to build this information and

manage the customers journey as they move towards high levels of customer satisfaction and trust

with their supplier. The result is a set of information no longer referred to as a single view of the

customer but the “voice of the customer” and contains information relevant to continued delivery of

and improvement in high levels of customer service.

Customers appear to be using Social media mostly for marketing, mostly for publishing slides, videos

as customer resources and for new information.

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This part of the survey shows that companies are not taking into account the personas (social media

influence ratings) of people when responding to social media posts. Companies are beginning to

escalate response when people of influence respond, but for the remaining majority response rates

are inconsistent.

Steps

Collect data, find out what people are saying about you (social media analytics)

Then U can decide how to provide service through social media

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Conclusion

In recent years Customer relationship might have been overshadowed by newer technologies from

Social media and mobile communications as companies strived to understand how the newer

technologies would effect their operations, but its importance is no less relevant today than when it

first appeared in the 90’s. The difference today is of course the advances in technology and

customer expectations mean that Customer relationship Management is more a continuous

improvement practice that a project to introduce new capabilities. Today it requires the skilful use

of People, Information, Processes and Technologies to be effective.

Organizations who believe the role of analytics is only to provide tactical or performance

information are missing the point, and excluding themselves from the advantages of using analytics

to leverage technologies. For an organization to mature it must embrace continuous improvement

practices and recognise customer relationships maturity is a journey not a destination.