Avoid the temptation of selecting a CRM application without first understanding the business implications of its expected benefits. The time spent developing and prioritizing business drivers reaps benefits by providing specific criteria against which you can evaluate vendor solutions, creating the foundation for measuring the ROI of your CRM investments, and assessing the effectiveness of CRM business strategies over time. In many organizations, this knowledge is fragmented in many sources and widely dispersed across many functions. The ability to leverage this knowledge consistently across the enterprise becomes a critical success factor for any CRM initiative. There are both operational and analytical components to this customer knowledge base.
Operational activities create and store new information about each experience with a customer.
Analytic activities use this information to analyze trends, measure progress, and determine new courses of action. Creating, institutionalizing, and leveraging a Customer-Centric knowledge base provides a solid foundation to enable all CRM applications and business processes.