360-Degree View of Your Customer

Let me start with an old story from India. This is a story about five blind men and an elephant. Five blind men are taken to an elephant, without being told what object they are standing near, and they are asked to identify the object. The first person finds elephant’s tail and declares that it is a rope. The second person gets hold the elephant’s leg and identifies it as a pillar. The third person reaches out to elephant’s tusks and claims it to be a spear. The fourth person finds elephant’s trunk and assures that the object is a python, while the fifth person claims the object to be a fan when he feels the shape of elephant’s ear.

As far as all these men were concerned, they were right in their diagnosis. However, they were looking at one elephant from their points of view. This is how many businesses make a mistake of looking at their customers, from the viewpoint of various departments. Sales will look at the same customer from the opportunity and pipeline point of view. Whereas, marketing will measure this customer based on their responses on various campaigns and customer’s propensity to move from a lead to an opportunity. For the finance team, this customer is all about accounts receivables, creditability and delayed payments. And for the support team, this customer could be all about number of support issues and the frequencies of contacts.

What happens if for the sales team a customer is an excellent customer as they have several opportunities worth hundreds of thousands of Dollars with them. But the same customer is not a good customer for the finance people, because they don’t pay on time, have considerable overdue payments, buy low margin items, and have several returns in the last twelve months. For a business to be prudent and successful, they need to be aware of all the aspects of their customers. Every customer-facing department should be able to see what other departments are doing with this customer. A support staff should know that before she annoys this customer on a support issue, there are $150,000 in the pipeline that the salesperson is trying to close this quarter. At the same time, before going in a meeting with the customer to close a deal, the salesperson should know that there are three critical errors pending for that customer for the last two days.

An integrated CRM (customer relationship management) system with a back-office ERP (enterprise resource planning) system is the key to getting a 360-degree view of your customers. This integrated approach has an advantage from the customer’s point of view as well – no matter which department the customer reaches out to, she will get a consistent response from the employees because the employees now have access to the relevant information. The inter-departmental communication barriers are also reduced with the help of such systems, thereby increasing customer’s satisfaction in dealing with your company. Overall, your company gets a competitive advantage in maintaining a good relationship with your customers and higher employee job satisfaction.

There are many integrated CRM-ERP systems in the market from vendors such as Sage, SAP, Microsoft, NetSuite, Oracle, Infor, and Salesforce.com. Some have a SaaS (software as a service) offering, some offer packaged software and few have both the options. Make sure that you do your due diligence in evaluating a good system that is well supported, affordable, has reference sites and is built on a good architecture. Good luck!