Making customer lifecycle management a mass-market reality

By Alastair Trower, Product Marketing Manager for EMEA, FrontRange Solutions

Some otherwise valuable management tools ultimately fail for lack of a common definition; trying to be ‘all things to all men’, they end up failing to deliver against the high expectations of the market and the overblown promises of over-optimistic vendors.

In contrast, customer lifecycle management (CLM) does not suffer from any such misconceptions or hyperbole, despite being an all-embracing concept. By common consent, it seeks to involve relationships between all those who touch the customer at any time during the entire lifecycle of the relationship with that customer – both within the business and third parties.

And the goal is simple: to maximise the conversion of suspects/prospects into worthwhile customers and ensure that the customer both stays with you and increases their spend. CLM recognises, and seeks to exploit, the long-recognised commercial truism that it is far cheaper and more profitable to grow business with existing customers than to attract new ones.

Top-end response

Until now, this has been achieved in the main by ‘glueing together’ disparate systems within the business. The reason is that, over time, systems have been built up by IT at the behest of other parts of the business, in line with the way in which individual teams and departments function. The result has been a proliferation of different internal architectures, all touching on the customer in different ways.

So, a typical corporate will have a shipping system for delivering product to the end customer, a finance system to secure payment and a sales system to identify customers and persuade them to buy. The systems will be independent and almost certainly will be unable to talk to each other; as a result, it is almost impossible, for example, for sales to check electronically whether or not a shipment has been completed.

Historically, such organisations have tackled this in one of two ways. With huge sums of money already invested in an ERP or supply chain management system, for example, some have simply added yet another module – in this case to provide customer service. At best, this adds another level of complexity. Yet if customer service is not part of the core skills set of the ERP vendor in question, the end-user will acquire a solution or application that is far from best-of-breed in terms of quality of customer delivery.

Alternatively, large companies have sought to consolidate their disparate systems – including, say, finance, ERP and CRM – by utilising middleware applications. Here, each department continues to use their own applications, but the new middleware makes that data available to others within the organisation.

By adding another layer, this approach similarly encourages the apparently inexorable growth of the IT infrastructure. And, by not reducing reliance on any individual departmental solution, all the associated deployment, upgrade, maintenance and training costs related to multiple suppliers and consultants remain.

Both approaches remain out of reach for all but the largest corporates. Not only are they expensive to purchase, but the real cost is ongoing – in integrating, administering and using such technologies.

Common platform

With the emergence of a common platform approach, however, the picture has changed dramatically. At FrontRange Solutions, for, example, the development of a .NET- based foundation underpinning all current and future product development has major implications for both FrontRange as a vendor and our broad partner and end-user base.

From a business development viewpoint, the foundation’s inherent flexibility means we are able to bring new applications to market and update them more quickly. Most importantly from a CLM perspective, however – as we continue to develop relationship management solutions that touch the customer throughout the customer lifecycle – the end-user will have a common interface with the customer, irrespective of their function or department. As a result, sales, marketing, accounting or dispatch staff, for example, will use essentially the same application, with any differences in data visibility based on the particular roles they fulfil within the organisation.

From an internal efficiency point of view, reducing the number of suppliers and simplifying the IT infrastructure clearly has fundamental implications on the ongoing cost and ease of administration. Yet the common platform approach delivers a number of other benefits.

In ensuring business continuity, for example, the FrontRange approach has a significant impact on training. In any growing business it is be necessary to pull in resources from other parts of the business from time-to-time: the common look and feel of the application enables any staff to be operational, helping customers, much more quickly. Furthermore, the ability to utilise web services ensures that common functions such as address verification, credit checking or product selection will be undertaken consistently throughout the organisation.

Delivering operational efficiency and cost savings are, of course, critical to the long-term financial health of the business, but the real value of the common foundation lies in the additional parallel benefits in providing a unified face to the customer. Building in consistency at an architecture level in turn promotes consistency of customer response. In other words, ensuring that common, high quality business processes and functionality are in place across the business, regardless of department, ensures a consistent, high level of customer delivery.

So, just as the most successful high street retailers are those who deliver the same superior quality customer experience in every outlet, the best trading websites look to the same technologies to provide consistency of process, in ensuring an equivalent high level of responsiveness in terms of search, purchase, stock availability and delivery – regardless of product.

Flexible service delivery

Companies such as FrontRange are bringing affordable CLM solutions within reach of the SME and distributed enterprise for the first time. And it is not just about product, for the vendor community is looking proactively at ensuring solution delivery also meets the very different needs of the broader marketplace.

FrontRange’s modular approach, for example, responds to the fact that a company is unlikely to want the complete range of the company’s foundation products. At the same time, in order to meet an equivalent demand for more flexible pricing and investment options, vendors are developing subscription pricing programmes, together with hosting and ASP offerings for customers not wishing to install costly internal IT architectures.

In increasingly fierce global markets, I believe the need for CLM has never been greater. Businesses recognise that they must buy and implement IT differently, for it is no longer viable to buy point solutions to meet point problems and then try to bind them together somehow. And, with the emergence of a new generation of products from companies like FrontRange based on common platforms such as .NET, practical and cost-effective solutions are now within reach of any business serious about improving their competitive position.