Customer Asset Management: The Future of Sales, Marketing and Customer Service Automation
	By Christopher Lochhead Executive Vice President, The Vantive Corporation

Savvy sales and marketing executives have to address the question: "How can we use new strategies, processes and technologies to profitably get and keep customers?"

The answer many are finding is Customer Asset Management. Customer Asset Management is a new business and technology strategy that moves far beyond traditional views of marketing, sales, customer service and information systems to dramatically improve all customer-supplier interaction. It seamlessly integrates all customer-related processes and systems. Companies implementing Customer Asset Management achieve a competitive advantage by becoming easier to do business with.

The interest in this new strategy is white hot. At the February 1996 Field and Sales Force Automation Conference sponsored by DCI and held in San Jose, Calif., 34 percent of conference attendees polled by Market Perspectives, Inc. said they came to "learn the best approaches to Customer Asset Management."

Unlike traditional Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems, which only address the sales process, Customer Asset Management Information Systems (CAMIS) enable tracking of customers through the entire customer life cycle, from initial marketing to customer service. With a Customer Asset Management Information System in place, all of your people are equipped to effectively sell or service customers.

Imagine what could be done with your World Wide Web site. A prospective customer visits your Web site to find out about a new product. They enter their name, address, phone number and e-mail address into a "lead form" screen. At this point, all contact data is automatically entered into your CAMIS. The lead is automatically sent to an inside sales representative. Your rep calls the prospect and qualifies them as a hot lead. The prospect is amazed at how quickly you respond to them. After the call is complete, the inside rep electronically forwards the lead to an outside salesperson. When the outside rep synchronizes their system to the corporate CAMIS, they will automatically receive the information about the new prospect. Now your salesperson has the ability to review all of the information before contacting the prospect. As your sales team goes through the sales cycle, all customer interactions are recorded. At the point of sale the customer's record "flows" to Order Processing and Credit, facilitating the initiation of the order processing even before the salesperson concludes their final closing interaction with the customer. The customer's experience of you is that you are thorough professionals who know how to use technology to make it easy to buy.

As the order flows through the system, the salesperson can track its progress, assuring that the order will be correct and on time. Should a problem arise, the salesperson can contact the customer, notifying them of its status and resolution. Once the sale is completed the Customer Support Department performs a satisfaction survey and a hand-off of the customer information back to Marketing. Then the marketing and sales cycle can begin again. This is an example of the powerful competitive advantage offered by Customer Asset Management.

Customer Asset Management has evolved from earlier developments in Total Quality Management, reengineering, customer service, sales and marketing automation and network-based computing. Like the Total Quality Management movement in the early 1970s or the introduction of network and client/server computer technology in the late 1980s, Customer Asset Management is in the early stages of market adoption. And like those previous trends, it is destined to become a mainstream business practice. It is critical to note that it differs from these past movements because Customer Asset Management has an external "customer-centric" focus. Its goals are to add value to every customer interaction and produce revenue growth, unlike reengineering, which tends to be focused on internal issues that produce decreases in costs.

Moving beyond basic views of systems, a CAMIS brings together systems and software that were traditionally treated as separate elements, with little or no shared usage. The core of a CAMIS is a customer database that acts as a central repository for all customer information. This data warehouse provides every person in your company with the right information, and the right time to sell or service customers. With a CAMIS in place customers never again hear, "I'll have to check with Accounting and get back to you," or "Call Customer Service; that's not my department." To empower customer retention and acquisition, systems must integrate around the customer.

The systems that must be rebuilt and/or integrated into a CAMIS are:

• Direct/Database Marketing
• Telemarketing
• Sales Force Automation
• Order Entry and Accounting
• Inventory and/or Manufacturing
• Customer Service and Support
• Executive Information Systems
• Data Warehousing
• Networked Client/Server Systems
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
• The Internet/World Wide Web/Public and Private Networks

With an integrated CAMIS, instead of having inconsistent experiences with your Accounting or Customer Service departments, the customer will experience the consistently high-quality interaction your company provides through unified processes and systems. Information about your customers will "flow" throughout your company, rather than getting stuck in one department's system. From the customer's perspective, it can be hard to get a supplier to answer two simple questions such as, "How much is it?" and "When can we get it?" In many cases the information to answer these questions is not easily accessible to field salespeople. A CAMIS alleviates all of the technology problems that can cause customers to become frustrated and take their business elsewhere.

It is clear that new strategies, processes and technologies dramatically impact sales and marketing results. Sales and marketing executives who embrace Customer Asset Management are enjoying a clear competitive advantage. Those who do not risk losing their most valuable assets.

Christopher Lochhead is executive vice president of The Vantive Corporation, based in Santa Clara, Calif., and a featured speaker at DCI's Sales Force Automation Conference. Vantive's World Wide Web site is at http://www.vantive.com.