The strategic support of CRM in the governance of the relationships between data and knowledge: the Balanced Score Card approach

The term CRM, Customer Relationship Management, is one of the most used word both in Marketing and IT literature and applications. This term is most of the time used as a replacement of a misleading narrow term: Relationship Management (RM). Operations, Customer Service, Sales, human resources, credit controls are essential ingredients in the customer satisfaction blender. So, as a matter of fact, we can conclude that the definition of CRM is also its objective: the development and maintenance of mutually beneficial long-term relationships with strategically significant customers. All this focus on customers and their needs comes from a shift from a mass marketing approach, through market segmentation, to an individualised marketing. This one-to-one marketing strategy is connected also with a more and more delocalised access to the markets from the logistics and distribution partners that implicates much more real-time expectations of the customers. So the market started to move from a product oriented structure to a customer oriented one but, unfortunately not all the companies haven’t adapted their organization to the new requests of the new “customer centric era”. This new approach is completely aligned with the strategic introduction of a Balanced Scorecard (Norton, Kaplan, 1999) solution where the customer management processes are one of four basic assets in the development of new business philosophy where the dynamic development of a company can’t be measure with static indicator but it has to be conceptualized as a whole organizational growing where knowledge management is key capital factor.