Customer Relationship Management in Business Networks

Abstract

The recent integration of the financial services industry and many financial services companies' decisions to focus on their core competencies have led to financial services companies joining in business networks. These networks naturally face quite a few issues to ensure that these cooperating companies have an integrated approach to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). In this article we describe these issues as we identified them after an analysis of six financial services companies that are all part of different financial services networks. The main obstacles to a uniform approach towards customers are found in business processes and information systems that are not integrated well enough. Some companies' customer-oriented business processes only know their customers partially, which is especially noticeable in after-sales service management and complaint management processes. However, the source of most of the issues to be found in such shared CRM processes is the limitations presented by the various companies' information systems' infrastructure. Obtaining a broad view of a customer relationship becomes complicated if the integration of systems containing customer knowledge, such as operational and analytical CRM systems as well as transaction systems, is limited. An improved integration of these systems could not only to improve the quality of customer consultancy, but could also encourage the further development of a customer's potential. To illustrate how a modern CRM application systems should be designed in financial services networks, we present a best practice case study of a leading financial services network in Germany. Based on the issues mentioned above and on best practice we propose five recommendations for a step-by-step improvement in customer relationship management in business networks.