Why Limit Relationship Management to Customers and CRM?

“What happens when our customer has a brother who’s a vendor, and a sister who works for our regulatory authority?

Disappointing the customer with delivery whilst demanding extra discount from the vendor might have an impact on our ability to satisfy the regulator. Doesn’t seem likely to be a positive influence.”

Our businesses have always been about relationships really.

The software industry in the widest meaning of the term has been obsessed with CRM ever since the collapse of the ERP business, following the millenium bug resolution.

But what was then a new market for the consultants to pitch has become a generic business requirement spanning from simple address books apps all the way across to the most complex outbound/inbound automated marketing systems.

It seems there’s as many definitions of the term CRM as there are people talking about it.  However, for most people the central function of CRM seems to be visibility of revenue generation – who is likely to buy what, when and for how much.  Basically what the sales guys call Pipeline Management.

Quite where this fits with Sales Force Automation isn’t clear, but if we ignore any subtleties SFA and CRM are pretty much the same thing.

If the concept is genuinely about relationships, it wouldn’t be limited to customers.  It would include partners, vendors, staff, associates – even external stakeholders.

With the rise of social media, the conversational web, permission marketing et al, it’s becoming obvious to even the most blinkered business process architect that we can’t enforce “one size fits all” processes to work with external parties.

Every interaction with external parties requires some degree of customization to fit the other side.

There’s a big lesson in this for our customer management buddies, of course.  But the lesson doesn’t stop there.  None of our businesses exist in isolation from the rest of the world.  We all rely on others in the supply chain, including services, to deliver our promise to customers.

Surely our relationships with all external parties need attention.

So maybe the IT consultants will dream up Vendor Relationship Management, Partner Relationship Management, Associate Relationship Management and Stakeholder Relationship Management.  Each one sounds like a new gravy train

But what happens when our customer has a brother who’s a vendor, and a sister who works for our regulatory authority?

Disappointing the customer with delivery whilst demanding extra discount from the vendor might have an impact on our ability to satisfy the regulator.

Doesn’t sound likely to be a positive impact, does it?

So maybe we need to take a different view of systems and understand our need to work hard at all of our relationships?

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Tagged as: Business, Business process, Customer relationship management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Marketing, Sales Force Automation, Sales force management system, Supply chain