Silvana Buljan

What happens when you're trying to sell premium automobiles and there's such a long wait in your showroom that prospective customers leave? What happens when customer emails go unanswered? What happens when customers have to wait so long on the phone, they hang up?

The answers to those questions are what led the general manager of a premium brand automotive dealership to adopt a CRM project.

One and a half years ago, he came to me and said, "Look, my marketing manager keeps bothering me with the need of implementing CRM in our company, but I don't see the what and how of CRM in my dealership. I have seen so many presentations on CRM that were too theoretical, too far away from my daily business, and never showed the direct results of CRM on my monthly sales performance. Are you able to support me in understanding what we should do, without showing me 50 PowerPoint slides?"

When the law firm that took over our company's legal advisory services two years ago asked me what Smartworxx did, I tried to find the right words to explain CRM to someone in daily contact with "customers"—in most cases, for extremely relevant and confidential issues to resolve.

My simple answer was to explain that we help companies be more customer-centric by improving processes and people performance, meaning implementing change and involving the whole organization into it. Surprisingly, the law firm asked me to make a presentation about CRM—and how to make it work in a Spanish-based law firm—to its board of management. So said. So done. And I still remember this challenging meeting!

Does a CRM implementation make sense for a law firm, and if so, how should it be structured to guarantee success? This was one of the crucial questions members of the firm raised, and I really had to think hard and use my practical experience to find the right...

The European low-cost airline EasyJet is known for having a culture that motivates employees, which in turn leads the employees to make the customers feel welcome. It's one firm that is working on creating what I call a CRM collaborative culture.

That is what happens when an organizational culture is based on the principle of putting the customer first in each and every interaction with the customer and across all departments. This means that a marketing employee will respond to an internal inquiry from a call center agent in the shortest possible time in order to give a quick reply to a calling customer. It also means that customer service is not the last to be informed about new product developments, new campaigns and new prices. And that means customers won't have negative experiences when they ask customer service for more details about those products, campaigns and prices. At the same time, customer service proactively informs the marketing department of new customer...

Imagine the following situation: You've been a customer of a multinational bank for 10 years. You are very satisfied with customer service and the relationship your bank is maintaining with you. Apart from such basic services as online and telephone banking, you personally know the bank director and receive special conditions for all your transactions because you're considered a very valuable customer. Your company decides to send you as expatriate abroad for five years, and you are contacting the local bank office to open a local account. Will the people there know you as customer—and your value for the bank?

Generally speaking, the answer is no. In the ideal CRM case, a customer history would be available in the bank's global database to be shared with customer service representatives all over the world, so the customer would get the best service and know he's valued. In the real world, the scenario is quite different: As a customer, you have to start "from...