Making of a Customer Centric Enterprise

Enterprise-wide Customer Challenges
The importance of customers remains same across boundaries. Becoming a 'customer-centric' enterprise is not about implementing a Customer Relationship Management solution. It is the ability of an enterprise to capture rich customer information and analyze it intelligently to know their customer well.
For enterprises, the challenge of meeting customer demands is increasing. Each department requires intelligent and updated information of customers to strategize effective business processes. No customer process and data stays in one department within the enterprise. In most enterprises, fragmented, redundant, and unsynchronized customer data resides across discrete data stores.
Following are some of the reasons for this:
Rapid growth
Mergers & acquisitions
Multiple product lines
Each business unit with their own representation and usage of customer data
Different transactional systems not sharing the customer data efficiently and in real-time, and others.
Because of inaccessibility to customer data across business units in real-time, these business units end up using inaccurate, insufficient and inconsistent customer data. Every department of the enterprise are faced with a different set of challenges due to this inconsistent and fragmented data structure, some of which are:
Marketing
Multiple business units usually capture Customer preferences, but no common view exists to address customer preferences consistently across the enterprise to avoid legal issues like unsolicited emails.
Other challenges faced by the marketing department includes:
Creating effective marketing campaigns and accurately measure its effectiveness
Inability to conduct closed loop marketing
Productivity issues and higher operating costs
Product pricing issues for global customers

Sales
Sales force spends large amount of time on non-value added customer information validation. They also face difficulties in cross/up selling due to non-integrated customer purchase history.
The primary challenges faced by the Sales force include:
Unavailability of updated order status information
High administrative costs for sales credit assignments
Difficulty in collecting consistent customer information from distributed reseller network
Inability to effectively tailor messages relevant to current customer experience
Partner integration

Order Management
The order management process is no different.
The challenges posed to the order management process due to unavailability of single customer data repository includes:
Field Representatives and partners are forced to utilize multiple tools for order entry process
Inadequate cycle time for customer delivery - bookings and Shipping delays because ofinadequate customer information entry (invalid and redundant customers)
Fulfillment linked to initial 'shipped to' or 'staging' sites, but not necessarily inclusive of an end install site, limiting insight/planning for true install base.
Information not effectively shared between functions creates double work and confusion for customers and field reps when ordering solutions
Longer order management cycle time
Support
Inability to accurately validate entitlement of callers; giving away free service
Inability to view complete relationship and sales history for potential cross sell opportunities during support occurrences
Lengthy call times due to non-value added customer information validation .Lack of consistent information being collected upon opening of service cases
Higher total cost to service
Finance & Executive Management
The Finance department and the Executive management on the other hand faces a different set of challenges, as they -
Are not clear on o Root cause of the problem
Benefits that can be drawn from consistent customer master across business units
Changes to internal & external Business processes and policies
Changes to Data management practices
Changes to Information Technology
Efforts and time required

Business Value
Can not offer a unified experience for customers across business units
Do not have single source of truth
Face difficulty in updating and accessing billing, receivables, claims, payables and other information
Face challenges in Forecasting and Planning
Get reduced Marketing effectiveness
Get reduced Sales effectiveness
Get reduced Support effectiveness
Get unclear customer account

IT Department
The challenges faced by the IT department are:
High data management costs due to approach of following after the fact maintenance
Inaccurate data
Insufficient data
Inconsistent data
Discarded data Inability to access up-to-date customer profile in real-time
Duplicate customer data across systems
Duplicates within systems (Same name spelled differently)
Customer creation at multiple systems
Problems Cross Referencing Customers
Sharing customer intelligence
Data and Work redundancy

Shift to Customer-centric Enterprise
The old enterprise model mainly focused on Operational Efficiency. Tools and systems were developed to increase productivity and decrease costs. Profitability was directly related to enhanced operational efficiency while the main investments were made in the merchandising and supply chain function areas. The main reason for the failure of this model was the inability to retain customers and revenues that consistently reduced. With the new model emerging, the focus shifted to customers. Enterprises realized that the most crucial asset on which they could base long-term revenue generation stratergies was: their customers. Leveraging customer information for improved customer satisfaction, lifetime value, retention and customer insight became the profit drivers for the company. Investment focus shifted to reatining and acquiring new customers. Establishment of multiple customer service touch points and effective market strategies came into focus.
Customer Data integration, customer information management and customer insight emerged as the key function areas to transform to a consistently growing 'customer centric' enterprise.
Customer-centric Framework
The customer-centric framework is the end-to-end customer solution. It is combination of Customer Information Management, Customer Insight and Customer Insight to Action. In a Customer-centric framework, customer data integration is strengthened by Business Intelligence applications. Each solution enclosed within the Customer-centric Framework serves specific set of functions to make an enterprise truly customer driven.
Customer Information Management
· Single 360-degree customer view
· Data Quality & Refinement
· Customer ID & Classification
· Rich Customer Information Customer Insight
· Customer Intelligence
· Customer Value
· Customer Profitability
· Product Profitability Insight to Action
· Product Development
· Marketing, segmentation
· Sales and Support
· Relationship Strategies
Business Strategy, BPM
At each phase, the customer-centricity improves the business value through each business function. It helps refine offerings after an intelligent analysis of the market and customers. Some critical Business Questions that makes the Customer-centric Framework successful are:
· In what way and how often do we interact with our different customers?
· What campaigns / offerings are the most successful with our customers?
· Are we effective in selling and serving our customers?
· What additional customer information will improve our efficiency and effectiveness?
· Who are our most profitable customers? What are our most/least profitable markets?
· What segments are underserved?
About Nirvana
Nirvana, The Customer Knowledge Company, develops and delivers Customer Asset Strategies to increase tactical and strategic decision-making capabilities across the enterprise. As a leading provider of CRM, ERP, integration, and business intelligence services to the Global 2000, Nirvana turns customer data into strategic knowledge that positively affects the entire enterprise. Established in 1990 with international offices, Nirvana has a long-standing commitment to global delivery and is uniquely qualified to deliver end-to-end solutions through valuable strategy consulting services and highly skilled engineering execution. Strategic and technology .For additional information on Nirvana's full range of services, please visit our website at ://www.nirvanainfocom.com