Quest for Customer Focus

Companies have poured enormous amounts of money into customer relationship management, but in many cases the investment hasn't really paid off. That's because getting closer to customers isn't about building an information technology system. It's a learning journey that begins with the creation of a companywide repository containing every customer interaction with the company, organized by customer. Communal coordination is what's called for at this stage, as each group contributes its information to the data pool separately from the others and then taps into it as needed. In the second stage, one-way serial coordination from centralized IT through analytical units and out to the operating units allows companies to go beyond just assembling data to drawing inferences. In stage three, companies shift their focus from past relationships to future behavior. Through symbiotic coordination, information flows back and forth between central analytic units and various organizational units like marketing, sales, and operations, as together they seek answers to questions like "How can we prevent customers from switching to a competitor?" and "Who would be most likely to buy a new product in the future?" In stage four, firms begin to move past discrete, formal initiatives and, through integral coordination, bring an increasingly sophisticated understanding of their customers to bear in all day-to-day operations.

• Decision making
• Customer relationship management
• Customer analysis
• Information systems
• Knowledge management