Customers are everywhere: clients, vendors, business partners, employees, mentors:
It used to be easy to define the word “customer.” But companies are becoming more diverse, with multiple locations, employees who telecommute, and vendors who function as partners. The idea of “customer” has broadened to include a wide range of end user of different kinds of corporate information.
For example, employees are customers when they need self-service information on 401(k) plans or other benefits. Likewise, the salesperson is a customer when she needs access to past customer conversations, open service tickets and past sales history before walking into that customer meeting.
Shareholders are customers when they’re looking for financial information. Vendors are customers when they need detailed specifications before they can proceed with a project. A colleague is a customer when you need to deliver time-critical data. And, of course, the buyer is always a customer whose experience is critical to your bottom line.
With a CRM system, you can serve all of the groups who rely on your company for important, timely information.
Customers are everywhere if you look at the bigger world and develop a customer-centric business philosophy for succeeding in doing business today and into the future.
Who else is a ‘customer’ in your business and are they identified in your CRM system?