Relationships

When organizations deal with people, relationships may occur. And that may be good, if no major wrong doings are done. In social, commerce and government context, relationships are the bonds that connect people and organizations and, so, create the networks that keep us together. Having good relationships is something so good that I won’t spend time praising it.

Relationships result from continued interaction processes and they imply some fundamental rules and attributes: there must be a clear purpose and the two parties involved must recognize and remember each other. There is no such thing as an amnesic relationship!

Relationships lifecycle are deeply rooted into the people and organizations own lifecycle: you buy a house in particular moments of your life so you then deal with real estate; so does your cataracts surgery, and perhaps, when that happen you will no longer buy a new motorbike for your own pleasure. And each relationship people start with a particular organization will flow differently.

First attempts to model and capture data from people relationships with organizations started modestly by looking at contact lists, with clients vaguely described by little more than names and addresses, used for all sorts of tasks such as database marketing and follow-up calls. Those records started being complemented with interaction information (the client popped-up at store, client did this then sent email…) and relationship information (people and organizations the client is related with). After the early boom of ERP adoption, many organization needed to improve their sales, marketing and services processes. So they became much more People Centric and CRM took that approach to new dimensions and embraced the challenge of capturing and sharing people and relationships knowledge.

Relationships are complex and fuzzy: there is no universal way to capture, represent and retrieve relationship knowledge in a structured simple way and this is starting to smell Big Data. Nevertheless, CRM is extremely capable of doing it when a comprehensive relationship model is defined (a simplification, I know, that’s what models are about), with a correct understanding of the value chain impacts of relationships management. In this way, it is possible to define effective, simple and structured relationships processes that can help the organization in sales, marketing and services activities. In a way, to capture relationships information we capture the interaction and business processes key data and cross it with the client description and activities. Each client profile flow differently through those processes and this is the power of CRM. This intelligence is achieved with effective analytics that segments clients correctly and do the right thing with each type of client.

For instance, the relationship you maintain with your Telco started someday with an appealing campaign they targeted at you and you started to use their networks the day you subscribed, you get billed monthly and pay punctually, sometimes you need support, one day you may feel seduced by a competitor and relationship ends, or not. Perhaps your brother has a totally different story to tell about this same Telco. This is an overtly simplified view of those processes and how they apply to people, but it illustrates how we can create a narrative with the key moments of a particular type of relationships model from which we dig in and detail to define a CRM model.