Welcome to my final post on the three processes that are key to a customer intimacy strategy. The subject of this post is customer relationship management. The first two posts were on product management and results management.

Before we implemented changes upon buying them, almost all of the ten companies we’ve acquired at Consona spread their customer relationship management across multiple employees and organizations. One company had four employees across four different organizations responsible for its own internal silo of the relationship with customers. The company had one representative each for software, maintenance, consulting services and customization services. This company’s structure was perhaps best for each of the different areas of the business in that an employee was focused on a particular product or service, but it was obviously not best for the customer. And, the company struggled to develop true relationships with its customers. I talked with managers at some customers who stated that they had not heard from the company in years. The company may have talked to its main contact at the customer about maintenance or ordering additional licenses, but it was not talking to the managers that were running the business.

Customer intimacy requires a focus on proactively managing customer relationships. Our approach at Consona is to centralize the management of customer relationships into one organization with customer account managers (CAMs) who are responsible for all aspects of our relationship with their assigned set of customers. From a revenue perspective, this means the CAM is responsible for and compensated on software, services and maintenance. We have a defined set of processes that ensures that our CAMs are proactively managing their customers. We also implement process changes to acquired companies that include managing all proposals to and negotiations with customers through the CAM.

The most significant change that we introduce when a company joins Consona is the culture change that the CAM is the decision maker when it comes to how the company responds to a need the customer has or to an issue that we are working to resolve for the customer. Our CEO is the best example of how to lead the way on this culture change. When customer interactions are escalated to his level, he always thoroughly engages with the customer in a discussion, but finishes with the statement that he will review the situation with their CAM,lk and the CAM will make the decision on our response. Managers across the business must support these culture and process changes in order for the transition to a customer intimacy strategy to work.

In the next few post, I’ll switch the topic to measuring customer satisfaction.