Summary: A brief summary of how to determine if your CRM solution is part of your company's value chain.

A value chain is made up of a number of activities that create and build value for the customer. Your CRM efforts should be a part of that value chain if you intend to develop a customer-centric organization. Only if your CRM initiatives complement your other company resources can you extract maximum value from your CRM. This value manifests itself in terms of a value chain within your CRM initiatives. It is this value chain that forms the basis of your customer relationship management decisions.

The company value chain consists of the following:

Logistics – Inbound and outbound logistics that deal with the storage and movement of goods.

Operations – Manufacturing or assembly of products.

Marketing – Reaching out to the customers.

Sales – Sale of product or service.

Service – The final primary activity in the value chain which includes after-sales service, complaint management, installations, etc.

CRM has to be well-integrated with each of these processes whose value should be measured in terms of the value they deliver to the customer. The customer’s point of view gets filtered to the processes via the CRM systems and related policies in place. Since a company’s value chain also includes its vendors and suppliers, you need to ensure that these entities too work in sync with your CRM objectives.

For CRM to mesh with your company’s value chain, you need to manage your value chain. Resources within the value chain need to be allocated such that maximum value can be achieved from those whom we choose to do business with. The value is in the form of process integration geared towards a customer-centric setup, customer satisfaction, and increased bottomline.

As with any process in the value chain, success with CRM is to be measured by its ability to deliver value to the customer. In order to do this, it is important that CRM be used as a tool to bridge the back end and the front end thereby connecting the entire value chain to a single thought process with reference to customer centricity.

CRM can add value to the customer and by extension to the company in several ways. Excellent service, fostering learning and information dissemination so that solution development can happen, helping suppliers perform dependably with consistency, etc.

CRM gets more ensconced into the value chain when customer experience is addressed as a part of the overall solution vis a vis products and services. This implies considering customer experience from the point of view of end users, IT department, accounts, and the various decision making heads. 

Conclusion

For CRM to yield ROI fast and offer effective customer management support, it is important that CRM strike a relationship with all the other processes and activities in the value chain. Sharing of knowledge and a common objective leads to effective collaboration which ultimately serves to optimize the customer solution chain from end to end. A CRM platform that succeeds in channeling value created at the beginning of the value chain to the customer can be considered to be well-integrated into the value chain.