Integrating BPM and CRM for Customer Satisfaction

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	Related Tools & Articles BPM Is the Next Phase in the CRM Evolution How BPM Helps CRM Deliver on its Promise of Managing Customer Relationships Combining Business Process Management and IT
	Discussion Forum "We are currently started rolling out BPM. One of the big challenges is to give the highest level Process Owners (L1) a good overview of how the process(es) are performing. I would like to hear about best practices how to roll up sigma scores (if appropriate?) or summarise results in a meaningfull manageable way." Contribute to this Discussion

The primary focus of any business today is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction helps businesses retain existing customers, generating business growth from reorders and referrals. Satisfied customers provide goodwill, enhancing the corporate image of the organization as solid, professional and dependable. Providing customer satisfaction in the face of rising customer expectations, as well as keeping costs low in the midst of pressures from a competitive, changing environment, is no easy task.
 
Challenges such as these compel companies not only to seek dynamic and cost-effective tools but also to find better ways of doing things. The solution lies in customer relationship management (CRM), using sound business management processes (BPM). This results in a unique connection of data sources, processes and strategies that provide customer service using the CRM interface. A well-documented, consistent and highly personalized end-to-end process, CRM uses a holistic approach to optimize efficiency. In this context, a process defines the interaction between people and systems to achieve strategies, the underlying organizational policies that drive decisions.

What Integrated BPM and CRM Does

The CRM approach means that companies can increase customer satisfaction by:

• Adopting an integrated approach to all customer data, processes and communication accessible in real time across departments
• Responding quickly and effectively to customers' needs at any point in the integrated process
• Streamlining processes by automating them, becoming cost efficient enough to (optionally) pass those savings to customers
• Optimizing business processes
• Becoming agile and responding dynamically to market changes

Why BPM and CRM Itegration is important

This integrated approach benefits organizations in other ways as well:

• Enhances business performance
• Promotes visibility into business processes so that users can understand the impact of the final outcome of their activities and tasks
• Creates awareness and focus on customer-oriented goals enterprise-wide
• Allows the company to achieve its growth potential
• Provides meaningful metrics to measure and improve real business performance
• Incorporates BPM findings and customer feedback to enhance customer satisfaction

Given the economic environment and constantly changing trends, customer processes can change rapidly. BPM gives IT departments and business managers not just the flexibility to incorporate dynamic change but also visibility into how their processes fuel the business by providing customer satisfaction. BPM eliminates employee isolation, integrating the workforce instead and focusing their efforts toward one common goal: dynamic customer management.

Because BPM distributes key CRM data across departments, financial departments can easily compile metrics enterprise-wide. This capability improves inter-unit cooperation and provides a standardized framework for real-time reports of vital metrics for analysis and action. Companies can easily access reports of revenue from all sources, whether online, retail or on the telephone, to determine growth. One example is that businesses requiring extensive travel can easily analyze travel costs in relation to travel rates to obtain better rates from providers.

By allowing access to other applications in an integrated system, the seamless approach allows users to boost sales and manage customers more effectively. This integrated approach allows CRM users to tap into inventory status reports, for example, and instruct concerned departments to up-sell to increase sales, or departments can determine customer status and reschedule waiting phone call queues so that prime customers get top priority. By making the data mine in CRM available to other data-rich applications (e.g., finance or consulting), companies can increase customer satisfaction and gain a competitive edge. Additionally, they can provide added value, retain customer loyalty, increase reorder business and easily comply with statutory requirements.

Ever-increasing customer awareness, demands and sophistication mean that companies need systems that do more than automate and streamline processes. They need systems that provide meaningful and easily accessible customer information to ensure highly personalized customer service. In addition to differentiated products, they need to focus on service as a unique feature of the corporate experience they offer customers and incorporate customer feedback for better decisions and service.

An integrated system also allows organizations to improve customers' experience when new standards come into effect. Companies can respond to and handle customer complaints consistently, while effecting changes within the appropriate training or operational areas. Companies can also analyze and act on any trends that could lead to complaints. Finally, they can work on improving both resolution times and the ratio of complaints received to those satisfactorily resolved.

Creating an Integrated BPM and CRM Approach

There are no strictures when it comes to implementation, but most companies start with financial processes. This allows the broader corporate culture enough time to accommodate the paradigm shift that BPM inevitably brings. Moreover, starting with finance paves the way for the implementation phase into CRM, operations and the supply chain management.

The next logical step is to reap the benefits of CRM. Using BPM, companies can first plan and identify their primary CRM concerns. The key drivers of value, a metric-like profitability per customer, could play a crucial role in choosing software, for instance. Or a company could focus on demographic areas that achieve the best response to profitability per customer; in this instance, CRM is aligned with the company's strategies. Another company might decide to restructure sales force incentives from gross revenue to net profit.

BPM works wonders for teamwork within an organization to provide better customer service. Customers usually are only too happy to provide feedback in the interests of forging better relationships. With BPM, companies can effectively process such feedback to provide the edge needed for better customer service.

Another example might be a global supplier of supermarket items. Such a firm might ask retailers for feedback on their trends and sales, to incorporate this data into shipping and inventory systems. The company could then determine which of its stocks are in demand and move quickly, as well as which to continue, increase production of or to discontinue. Feedback can tell management the best ways to get inventory to retailers on time and can therefore provide an efficient, valuable service to customers. This kind of action and analysis of customer feedback keeps organizations continually competitive and innovative.

Conclusion

Customer service is such an important part of business today that companies treat it as a part of their integral strategic business plan. CRM without the integrated dynamic approach of BPM, however, is not enough to counter global competition in today's challenging economic environment. BPM's integrated approach makes all the difference to satisfying customers, retaining their loyalty, providing added value and generating growth. In fact, CRM with BPM might be the difference between those companies that flourish and those that fail to survive.