CRM Manifesto

The CRM Manifesto is a declaration of the fundamental truths about Customer Relationship Management.  It is intended to be used to inform and remind those on a CRM journey what they are seeking to achieve.

CRM Manifesto

We are changing the way our organisation interacts with its customers, and by necessity how it interacts with itself.

We believe that…

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy of increased and better informed customer focus, combining business policies and processes, and changes to the customer experience
2. CRM is not a technology, CRM is not software.
3. CRM seeks to proactively manage business processes which improve relationships with current and prospective customers, increasing a customer’s lifetime value and driving revenue increases.
4. Engaging in CRM means that the way we work is going to change.
5. Customers want to be able to engage with the organisation through the channel and device of their choice.
6. Automating processes and using technology solutions to transport data will allow us to focus on adding value to our customer interactions. We want our customer-facing staff to be able to focus on the customer and not the system.
7. Having a single view of a customer’s engagement across the organisation will allow us to further focus on adding value to our customer interactions. By giving our customer-facing staff ready access to information about our customers, their interactions with the organisation, and their products and services, our staff can best exercise their talents to add value to the customer interaction. Additional opportunities present themselves when we know the connections between our commercial and consumer customers [For Organisations that have both B2B & B2C relationships].
8. Every interaction with a customer presents an opportunity to add value to our relationship; we must strive to achieve that.  If every interaction feels consistent and complimentary then we can achieve a consistent cross channel experience for customers.
9. Quantifying how the CRM programme increases customer value is important; we track value before, during and after we implement change.
10. Customers do not care about the intricacies of our internal processes, but these back-office processes may impact on our customers’ experience.
11. Deploying a CRM system will NOT, by itself, improve sales and drive customer retention. Any CRM solution we have is simply an enabler to achieve known business goals; improved processes and policies will deliver the results.
12. CRM software can help drive process consistency across the organisation; we welcome a consistent approach.  And whilst CRM software can help us manage, using it just as a management tool is not customer relationship management.
13. Changes to the way we interact with customers is ongoing; CRM is a journey and not a destination.

If you’d like to show your support for the CRM Manifesto, please visit the signatories page and add your name to the list