Organisations today, operate in a tightly knit world of conversations in the form of feedback and criticism coming from every corner - offline and online – through various channels. How to make sense of so much data and make it more organisation-friendly to yield the maximum benefits! This is the first installment of a 3-part whitepaper covering - Evolution and growth of CRM, Multi-channel Integration, and Customer Response Management - attempts to address these questions and more.

1. customer centria
The Customer Engagement & Experience Company
The Evolution and growth of CRM
Date: 14/02/2012
www.customercentria.com

2. Summary
Progressive customer relationships define the world for today's organisations. Companies in the current state of
affairs operate in a tightly knit world of conversations in the form of feedback and criticism coming from every
corner - offline and online – through various channels. How do we streamline all this data and make it more
organisation-friendly to yield the maximum benefits! These answers are what we aspire to achieve from this
Thought Paper.
The purpose of this Paper is to highlight the need for a Multi-Channel Marketing Framework and Response
Tracking mechanism, all seamlessly tied up, given the current scenario of Marketing Automation, in whatever
avatar, being the norm, not the exception. It is essential to have a single customer view, resulting in effective one-
to-one marketing dialog with today's tech savvy customers via multiple channels. This Thought paper is divided
into 3 parts
The Evolution and growth of CRM
Multi-channel Integration, and
Customer Response Management
The Evolution and growth of CRM, provides a line of sight into the
journey of the relationship between customer and organisation. The
document aims to explain the change, which has taken place not only
in terms of technology and marketing, but also in terms of lateral
thinking on the part of the modern organisation. Destination CRM
was not easy to attain due to various challenges, which started from
quality of information to the way in which information was stored.
The second paper, Multi-Channel Integration, provides an in-depth
account on the approach to a Multi-Channel marketing framework,
the challenges organisations typically face during implementation
and the organisation wide they would reap once it’s implemented.
And in conclusion, Customer Response Management, the last in the
series, emphasises on the criticality of implementing and integrating
Customer Response Management, and the role that Customer
Centria can play, in delivering an end-to-end response management
solution in a well-integrated Multi-Channel environment.
www.customercentria.com

3. CRM: The Evolution
The present is incomplete without the past – and that stands true for technology as well. To understand the
significance and existence of the current marketing strategies and channels, it is imperative to look at the entire
evolution of customer-organisation relationship as a tale, contemplating on vital junctures to understand the
route. Let’s start with the Evolution of CRM
‘Organisation-Customer Relationship’: As perceived historically
Once upon a time, customers needed organisations, but then competition struck, and consumers got empowered
with the power of choice. Today, businesses depend on people-to-people and business-to-business interaction
and the game has changed for many from B2C to C2C. There is no room for obsolete communication channels and
out-dated customer management technologies, because the consumers have moved on and it is time for
marketers to wake up and smell the coffee.
In today’s customer oriented market where strong relationships with the customer is the cornerstone for building
loyalty and thus ROI, any company, organisation or an institution has to be geared towards a strong framework
supporting integration of disparate data sources and marketing channels with preferred Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) solution.
‘Integration’ in today’s context is now inextricably linked to the entire marketing operation framework, which
would include marketing channels, transaction systems, data warehouses/data marts etc. And so, when it comes
to leveraging customer data across many disparate sources and opportunities, seamlessly aggregated marketing
machinery is essential for an effectual marketing dialog with customer.
In the early 90’s, organisations were apprehensive about Data Warehouse implementations
because of common myths like –
The merging of current customer data with secondary sources ultimately hurts the
customer
Customer profiling may lead to more customised service and hence reduced consumer
value
Data warehouses reduce organisational productivity and hurts organisational image
Data warehouse increases waste and harm the environment
It’s difficult to find ROI on the Data warehouse
Data warehouse requires an engineering approach and hence is resource and time
intensive
www.customercentria.com

4. Similarly marketers earlier were apprehensive about using multiple channels when it came to targeted
campaigning because of common myths like –
Most loyal customers prefer interacting via one channel
Most people buy and shop via one channel
Most people do not like direct mails
Online marketing cannibalises offline efforts
55 plus audience is not web savvy
Becoming a multi-channel company does not require restructuring
Each channel is a separate user experience
Apparently with ever growing transactional data, organisations felt the need to adhere to a solution, which will
provide clean, transformed and catalogued data for use by managers and other business professionals for data
mining, online analytical processing, market research and decision support. Data warehouse was one such
solution, which when implemented would provide holistic view of the historical data and this is where the
evolution of CRM commenced.
As organisations started turning towards data warehousing solutions to get a centralised view of historical data
combined from various sources, organisations started to realise that just doing BI and OLAP reporting was not
going to be enough to achieve what was required to build a marketing dialog with customers build a strong
customer relationship.
This was the time when organisations started feeling the need for establishing a framework, which could leverage
the data warehouse to build strong customer relationship model as OLAP reports analyses resulted in confirming
a fact that 'All customers are not equal', which spurred an evolution of 'Customer Relationship
Management'.
Why the Evolution?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a broadly
recognised, widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s
interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves
using technology to organise, automate, and synchronise business
processes — principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,
customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find,
attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company
already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs
of marketing and client service. CRM denotes a company-wide business
strategy embracing all client-facing departments and even beyond.
When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and
technology – all work together to increase profitability, and reduce
operational costs.

5. CRM and the Data Warehouse
The key challenge for business today is implementing an information infrastructure that enables rapid responses
to competitive pressures and the capability to survive into the future.
Corporate strategies that impact customer relationships, and the management and application of customer data
to business operation - CRM for short - are dependent on an information superstructure comprised of various
technologies that enable organisations to store, access, analyse, and manipulate vast amounts of customer data.
Most organisations with large numbers of customers to manage, frequently in the thousands or millions, require
a combination of sophisticated technologies to implement CRM.
One of the major contributing technology areas to CRM is ‘Data Warehouse’, which facilitate handling of a range
of CRM-oriented functions like –
Data storage
Database queries
Value analysis
Mathematical models for predictive analysis
Analytics
Thus for a CRM to evolve, data warehouse have become core component of doing business, as well as building
block for a corporate CRM strategy. This technology is a prerequisite for the level of one-on-one customer
relationships that can turn information into a company's most important resource.

6. CRM and Marketing Automation
Once CRM took shape post evolution, the next challenge was to have a framework, which will use CRM to provide
the automation and analytical insight to move more prospect relationships into customer relationships and
retain existing customer relationships.
A typical CRM roadmap will have following milestones –
1 Analysis of the current state of customer interactions
2 Predicting the future course of customer interactions
3 Developing the plan of action to meet the predicted future course
4 Building and presenting the business case to secure CRM project funding
To attain the above roadmap, need for a 'Marketing Automation System' was felt to provide the following benefit
Increased marketing effectiveness
Deliver more sales ready-leads to sales teams
Nurture prospects so they move through the channel faster
Measure the marketing influence on opportunities in the focus
Provide marketing accountability and ROI
Ensure that marketing only adds validated, standardised data into the CRM

7. All this can be achieved via focussed 'Marketing Campaigns' that are measurable, leverage cleaner, richer data
and produce predictably great results. Marketing automation not only brings efficiency through automation and
effectiveness through better execution, it also brings a new level of measurability to marketing.
Marketing Automation solution brings the unprecedented ability to define business rules to connect marketing
campaigns and programs to sales opportunities, so the precise impact of marketing on the business results can be
measured. With the costs entered into the campaign definition, one can even measure the ROI and cost per
lead/contact.
Marketing Automation software is a powerful tool that can help an organisation to become more efficient,
conduct successful marketing campaigns, reach the most profitable customers, build long-lasting relationships,
better understand product and market dynamics, and measure the productivity of marketing operations.
Marketing Automation — at its most fundamental level was developed to help marketers' better target and
execute one-to-one communication with key prospects within the context of demand generation efforts,
simultaneously orchestrating and tracking marketing resources against this activity. CRM consolidates a great
deal of information about prospects and customers; however, it provides virtually no framework or tools for true
nurturing of earlier-stage prospects, and it definitely is not a communication platform. Marketing automation
leverages CRM and addresses these gaps, but it then presents new capabilities for marketers that enable them to
take their demand generation programs to the next level.
Marketing automation software's unique design helps manage relationships with the past, present and future
clients, consultants, contractors, and even competitors, to ensure that no opportunity for acquiring a new project
is overlooked. There are five core areas of functionality that are essential for any good marketing automation
system. All the five are listed below –
1 Contact Data Integration 2 Response Management 3 Lead Management
4 Campaign Automation 5 Marketing Business Intelligence

8. Marketing Automation and Marketing Channels
Now that marketing automation gained prominence and campaign management became inevitable, the
challenge for organisations was identifying the best way of communicating with the customers so that they get the
right offers at the right time and that would have happened without reaching customers via predominant medium
called 'Channel'.
With the advent of technology and ease of using it, today there are various channels to reach customers based on
their preference and liking for a particular channel.
Some of the most commonly used channels today include Email, SMS, Call Centre (Inbound and Outbound),
Direct Mailers, Print Media, TV, Radio, Billing Systems, POS, and ATM etc. All channels are not applicable to all
verticals, but most of them would have some channels in common for e.g. an Email, SMS or Call Centre.
Leveraging the potential of existing channels to their maximum capacity and ability was the next challenge
organisations faced, as the modern customer was very particular about the communication and its mode as well.
Selecting the most preferred channel for the target customers was top priority, as a varied choice of
communication channels also meant intelligent decision-making on part of the marketers. This is where the
Campaign Management component of Marketing Automation plays an important role, running campaigns that
result in data enrichment and address the right customers.

9. The evolution of marketing channels enabled personalised communication in various ways for e.g. Promotions,
Personalised offers, Anniversary/Birthday Wishes, Loyalty related updates and lots more. The idea was to keep in
touch with the customer, and at the same time encourage him to buy what he likes and also what he/she 'might'
like. This approach led to a communication revolution, as organisations adopted Channel Marketing Strategies
that allowed organisations to make choice of channels based on following factors:
For organisations, channels have became the next big medium to reach their consumers – a tool with the power to
motivate and inspire their existing customers to buy their products and prospective customers to consider their
brands. Channel strategy includes recommendations for both identifying and managing channel partners.
Channel marketing is a dynamic and complex arena where mistakes can prove costly and extremely difficult to
correct.
To formulate and execute a channel strategy, organisations must follow these steps:
1 Understand the channels that are available.
2 Identify the need, based on organisation's objectives and the preferences
of customers.
3 Generate a list of likely channel partners.
4 Recruit channel partners to work with.
5 Manage the channel partners on an on-going basis.

10. Bottomline:
We saw the evolution of CRM from a Data Warehouse to its smart utilisation for implementing Marketing
Automation. With the growing acceptance of CRM and Marketing Automation, organisations opted for Multi-
Channel Campaigns, and some obvious questions popped up:
Are you engaging your audience with targeted, relevant and personalised content?
Are you delivering your message through your customer’s preferred media?
In the next paper, we will dig deeper into the dynamics of a Multi-channel integration, and explore the elements
that help define a strong multi-channel framework.