Business Technology, for the Win - Customer Relation Management (CRM)

Every year, Gartner surveys CEOs from across all industries to find out what their top priorities for the coming year are. Inevitably, business growth lands at or near the top every year. These CEOs further expound that there are three topics that comprise their desire to grow: geographic expansion, sales revenue, and earnings/profits.

The next question is what CEOs expect from their CIOs. In the past, the role of the CIO was that of a technology leader. They were responsible for ensuring that the lights were on and that the systems were running smoothly. If there were no operational outages, the CIO was successful and left alone to run the organization.

This is changing, and with growth being the top priority, CEOs are looking to IT as an enabler of growth. CIOs can no longer sit back and merely make sure that the systems are running. They need to ensure that the systems are ultimately delivering capabilities that support geographic expansion, sales revenue, and earnings/profits.

The key to all of these goals is understanding who these customers are and providing them with an optimal customer journey. CIOs are being asked to become the Chief Customer Experience (CX) Officer. To do this, they need to understand how to support customers globally across cultures, how to enable sales leaders to reach out and nurture customer relationships, and how to leverage systems to increase retention and decrease customer attrition and churn.

At the heart of efforts associated with customers is the concept of a Customer Relation Management (CRM) system. Don't be fooled into believing that CRM technology is equivalent to a CRM system. A CRM system includes a technology platform at its core, but it is only one component of the bigger picture.

In the Gartner series of research called The Eight Building Blocks of CRM, they lay out eight components that go into a CRM system: vision, strategy, metrics, customer experience, organizational collaboration, processes, information and insight, and technology.

Business Alignment

As you can see, technology is only one component of the broader ecosystem all working in parallel to provide a great customer experience. It is definitely important to pick the right technology platform for the business, but only after you are clear on where you are going (the vision), how you are getting there (the strategy), and how you will measure success (the metrics). These ensure that IT is aligned with the business and in the end, the project will deliver the goal of business growth.

Customer Alignment

Once alignment is achieved with the business objectives, it is important to understand that a CRM system cannot be done in a vacuum. It is a core component of the business and needs agreement from and collaboration with stakeholders from across the organization. This requires an analysis of where the touchpoints with the customer are, which departments play a role in these experiences, and what the overall customer journey looks like - including customer sentiment at each step. Once the customer experience and journey are mapped out, IT can coordinate with those impacted organizations to optimize the overall process.

IT Alignment

It is after these other components of the CRM system start to form that you can begin the evaluation of technology platforms and implementation partners. It is important that the role of the CRM technology platform be two-fold:

• enable the optimized customer experience processes
• expose the information and insight for making decisions on how to better care for your customers

If you can find a partner technology that can accomplish this, you will be well on your way to providing the enablement for your CEO's desired growth.

As a CIO, you are positioned well to understand the technology and the information and collaborate and coordinate the efforts of your peer organizations. If you are successful, you can ensure that your customers and future customers have an optimal experience throughout their lifecycles. This will align the efforts of the IT department with the priorities that your CEO has for you in a major way.

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If you would like to learn more about how these eight building blocks work and how they can provide value to you in your CRM journey, the experts at Gartner can provide you with context-specific guidance on how to implement this in your business scenario. With your Gartner subscription, you have access to research analysts such as Varun Agarwal , Gene Alvarez , Ilona Hansen , Melissa Hilbert , David Norrie , Michael Chiu , and Priyantha C. Rathnayake to assist you in achieving success.