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Knowledge and Customer Relationship Management (KCRM)

For today’s businesses, their knowledge or intellectual capital can be their most valuable assets. Intellectual capital can include everything from the skills and knowledge that a company has developed about how to make its goods or services; to the individual employees or groups of employees whose contacts, experience and skills are deemed critical to a company's continued success; to the aggregation of data about its processes, customers, research results, and others that serve as useful information for the company to be able to compete in the market.

Key to effectively leveraging their knowledge capital is their IT infrastructure. It should be recognized as a knowledge asset so that it can be managed as something that keeps growing in value steadily, reliably, and safely. It must be designed for evolutionary growth instead of keeping it alive by patching it up until such time as a sudden convulsion makes it necessary to replace it without much delay.

Management must insist that applications software be preserved by means of technical designs that accommodate rapid changes in computer technologies. Management should demand delivery of software applications that take advantage of innovations in operating systems, adapt to revisions in organization structure, and take advantage of any streamlining of business practices. Systems built with reconfigurable, modularized components that can be reorganized, reconfigured, and extended to provide unprecedented freedom in adapting network-based infrastructures to changing business conditions. Such a foundation can be created by applying an information technology framework based on open standards, common interfaces, and portable technology.

Effectively designing and implementing this technology framework will require the expertise of people adept in a new kind of intellectual discipline—a science of services that merges business management, computer science and technology. The idea is that a business and technology-savvy professional can study subpar business operations and come up with better ways of doing things—armed with knowledge in business best practices, standardized work processes, and reusable software programs.

Knowledge and Customer relationship management (KCRM) is a broad term that covers the management of all aspects of a company's interaction with customers, as well as the capture, storage and analysis of customer information. KCRM as it pertains to systems software are tools that help an enterprise enable its marketing departments to identify and target their best customers, manage marketing campaigns with clear goals and objectives, generate quality leads for the sales team, assist the organization to improve account and sales management by optimizing information shared by multiple employees, streamline existing processes (for example, taking orders using mobile devices), provide employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers, understand their needs, and effectively build relationships between the company, its customer base, and distribution partners.

This practice area covers the following solutions:

Operational KCRM: automation or support of customer processes that include a company’s sales or service representative. Typical solutions include:
- Sales Force Automation
- Helpdesk or Customer Support Systems
Collaborative KCRM: direct communication with customers that does not include a company's sales or service representative ("self service") such as:
- Customer / Partner-facing portals
- Interactive Media such as websites, CDROMs, Kiosks
- Interactive voice response
Analytical KCRM: analysis of customer data for a broad range of purposes:
- Business Intelligence systems
- Forecasting