Because Customer Relationship Management is as much about business process as it is about technology, the first step must be clarifying your company's business processes as they relate to your customers.

At first, this task can appear to be overwhelming. Your business can be complex and unpredictable. Your customers come in various shapes and sizes, each requiring a differing attentiveness and familiarity from your company. An effective CRM methodology is to begin by designing processes around interactions with your customers. These interactions, or touch-points-, are critical since they are most apparent to your customers. Your success or failure with a customer is a direct reflection of how satisfied your customer feels with these touch-points. A critical analysis may include the following questions:

• What are the various touch-points with your customers?
• Who, internally, controls these various touch-points?
• Which of these touch-points is the most critical in the overall process?
• What information is being collected and/or disseminated at each touch-point?  
• How is that information being stored and used?  
• What additional information could be collected at these touch-points?
• How else could existing or additional customer information be used to better serve the customer in this process?

Each department may have there own separate processes, or they may share similar ones with other departments. You will need to involve key employees in each department in order to get the best possible view of the effectiveness of each process. Properly designing each individual process will help pave the way as your further develop your CRM practice and solution.