“CRM applications are very data centric in nature, but if you’re actually going to use one you need to be process centric,” said Bill Band, VP and Principal Analyst Serving Business Process Professionals for Forrester, in our conversation at the CRM Evolution 2012 conference in New York City.
“While a CRM is great at collecting and storing customer information, it’s not so good at connecting business process from end to end,” said Band.
To be able to handle a case from beginning to end and deliver a great customer experience, Forrester’s clients are trying to add business process capabilities on top of their CRM systems.
While it’s key to have process, it’s often not necessary for a simple customer interaction into the CRM. Overloading the CRM with unnecessary processes is one of the key pitfalls Band sees with adding business process management.
“Business process management can help you deliver a better customer experience but you should only be focusing on things such as customer service interactions, client on-boarding, load applications, or things where there’s a lot of complexity in the business process. If you don’t have that kind of complexity, a traditional data-centric solution will work just fine,” said Band.
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