Association Insight International & European Association Insights Winter 2015 | Page 16

Association Insights | Article

Expert Briefing

Blueprint
for CRM

A

Michael Collins

Entering
the realm of Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) or Member
Relationship Management (MRM), we
encounter a concept that relies on a culture
that puts the constituent at the heart of all
processes, communications and policies and
is normally supported by technology.

Most exponents of C/MRM portray it as a strategy that
of the organisation. Any touch point with members and
customers – not just campaigns – can be better executed
from the position of greater knowledge, the marketers can
be ensuring the best spend of their budget and maximising
budget is being spent and where it is effective and the CEO
can have an overall view of how the organisation is being
run.
Whilst this sounds very laudable and makes for a
worthy goal, many organisations run headlong into what
they believe C/MRM to be without fully assessing the
consequences, or even truly understanding the approach
and whether they are fully prepared for it.
Organisations need to understand how a constituent
wants the relationship to be managed – what channels of
communication are preferred, what kind of proposition is
and acted upon. There are those who, unless they receive
every offer going, feel unloved; and at the other end of
the spectrum there are those who want to be left to their
own devices. Both could be equally loyal advocates of your
organisation and that loyalty will be undermined if one fails
to understand how they want to be dealt with.
The solution is to build a framework that integrates
commercial objectives with technology, the skills of the
organisation’s human resources, business and market
intelligence, and the dialogue between organisation and
constituent.
The starting point, however, is not the implementation of
technology.
16 | Winter 2015

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