Here are several excerpts from an insightful post by Ann All, an IT Business Edge blogger, At the Intersection of BPM and CRM: Happy Customers:
Companies appear to be spending a fair amount of money on CRM. So why aren’t customer-satisfaction scores improving?
A number of speakers at Gartner’s recent Customer Relationship Management Summit tried to answer this question, based on TechNewsWorld coverage of the event. Several speakers mentioned refreshing CRM applications with advanced analytics or Web 2.0 technologies. This all sounds fine and good, but I was more intrigued by the growing convergence between CRM and business process management (BPM).
It’s an eminently logical trend, since customer satisfaction isn’t likely to grow without end-to-end process improvement. Gartner stressed the connection by scheduling its BPM Summit back-to-back with the CRM event and in the same general location, making it easy for folks to attend both if they chose.
Microgen’s COO David Sherriff took advantage of the opportunity. He said:
“CRM is about the stuff that’s ultimately customer-facing, but without the right processes underneath it all, the best CRM strategy can’t work. I think co-locating these events was a great message to send about the need for holistic business process technologies, which impact every customer.”
I like Sherriff’s use of the word “holistic.” Too often CRM is a disjointed mishmash of departmental or divisional activities. CRM touches a number of enterprise systems, including operations, accounting and e-commerce, so companies must make a better effort to integrate their CRM data with these other systems, a point made by IT Business Edge blogger Loraine Lawson last month. BPM is fundamentally about taking a holistic view and figuring out how to streamline and improve end-to-end processes.
Need further proof of process improvement’s importance to CRM? According to a SearchCRM.com story about the CRM Summit, attendees at another recent Gartner event cited business processes affected by CRM as their top challenge.
While the connection between CRM and BPM appears clear, most BPM vendors continue to focus on operational improvements rather than boosting customer-satisfaction levels, says Gartner. Fewer than 5 percent of BPM vendor case studies focus on customer retention or other satisfaction-related issues.
Many organizations struggle to identify all the business processes that affect their customers, the first of seven steps in a process-improvement plan offered by Isher Kaila, Gartner’s Reserach Director. While some, like contact centers and order fulfillment are pretty obvious, others are not.
