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Customer-relationship management applications are old-school thinking. They're designed from the inside out to answer questions for the business, such as: How can we optimize our sales pipeline? How can we sell more products to each customer? How can we track incidents to ensure quick problem resolution?

CRM apps are lousy at addressing the more important and strategic customer issues: How can we make it easier for our customers to do business with us? How can we help our customers achieve their objectives?

To fix CRM flaws, you must take a radical, outside-in approach and alter your thinking. Rather than automate your internal processes, streamline your customers' processes. Make it easy for customers to do business with you: Give them self-serve touch points via ATM, checkout, kiosk, phone, or the Web. Grant them access to your back-end applications using a service-oriented architecture with rich, easy-to-navigate user interfaces appropriate to each touch point and optimized for each of four scenarios.

We believe that customers want to explore, evaluate, try out, select, and convince themselves that yours is the right solution. Second, they want to use or consume products or services in ways that work for them. Third, they want to know where they stand at all times vis-à-vis consumption, level of service, terms and conditions, payment, entitlements, status, updates, renewals, refills, expirations, add-ons, or replacements. Finally, they want to understand and quickly fix or replace anything that isn't meeting their needs.

These four scenarios lend themselves to endless variations based on the situation, product category, customer demographics or psychographics, and whether buyers are business customers or consumers. You'll outpace competitors if you streamline as follows:

* First, design solutions so that every customer can easily execute via self-service.

* Second, when customers prefer personal assistance, give your service reps easy access to the information they need to render that help.

* Third, ensure that all the information that customers see regarding their account and interaction history is equally available to authorized personnel.

* Finally, mine all this rich data so you can spot behavior, usage, and consumption patterns, diagnose problems, prevent defections, make offers, assess profitability, and woo more profitable customers.

Designing from the outside in lets your customers manage their relationships with your company. You may think of this as a customer portal. To me, it's a transparent, easy-to-use, multitouch-point environment for customer-managed relationships.

This is the second in a three-part series.

Patricia Seybold > Author of Outside Innovation (HarperCollins Publishers, 2006)

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