Global CRM

Walls Between Customer Data: Compliant or Idiotic?

International Rectifier is a top MOSFET company -- and now it has a global support solution from one of the best, most innovative CRM companies, RightNow Technologies. (Check out IR here .)

RightNow's solution has attempted to fix part of the problem that plagues global companies: How do you create a single view of customer interactions across different systems, regulatory regimes, cultures and languages, and report information into the company to drive continuous improvement of your customer relationships? IR has made strides with RightNow to make such information available transparently across its business units globally. For companies who consciously model their operations globally, such technology is essential. (See the CitiBank story below to tell you how to do this wrong.)

International Rectifier is now able to use a "follow-the-sun" schedule for the customer support centers. This reduces personnel costs. It uses the incident and knowledge management components of RightNow's solution to leverage the experience of each customer support center. In short, it's a classic "project our value" global technology solution. By that I mean that IR is scaling a single solution across all its units. The question (which we hope to address in the next installment after I interview folks at RightNow), is how much localization had to be performed on the data sharing rules. (This is, of course, an incredibly hot topic. Companies are constrained by regulations that differ across regimes. Check out this story from Information Week.)

Good for IR. But companies who are in fact global just don't behave as if they are.

When I was in Kuala Lumpur leading a workshop on best practices (working with my charming colleagues at Pacific Conferences), a participant put his finger on a big problem. Some airlines don't keep track of their loyalty program participants using the same coding system from country to country. He was a dual citizen, US and Malaysia, and yet all his frequent flyer miles on his US account were not available to him in Malaysia. (I don't get it, either.) What was even more egregious, they wouldn't transfer his frequent flyer miles from his older US account to his new Malaysian one. As far as the airline was concerned, he was two different people.

Can you hear the sound of customer value being destroyed?

This is just the global example. Domestic companies have the same problem when their databases don't talk to each other.

I've got whopping student loans from CitiBank, thanks to my fantastic global executive MBA program TRIUM. Somehow I've gotten on mailing lists from a dozen banks, all of them slobbering on me to get me to consolidate my student loans with them. In theory, I should do this before July, when interest rates are going up.

One of those banks hounding me is ... CitiBank.

Just got a call from them today, wanting me to move my loan from their student loan department to their consumer loan department, at a lower interest rate.

This situation is even worse. Not only do I think that CitiBank is nuts for not knowing that I have my student loan with them, but they're just about to lose interest income because their loan departments are competing with each other in all the wrong ways.

The problem may partially be business rules that put up walls between customer databases at CitiBank. It may be a regulatory issue. But my perception is just that one hand doesn't know what the other is doing. From my perspective, they're slapping themselves around in a fevered attempt to ... what? Annoy clients and lose interest income?

But the global issues are delicate, and worth looking into. RightNow's approach is worth talking about. We'll do that in our next posting.