Leadership, Change management, and Corporate Culture

 Success of your business’ customer knowledge management initiative partly depends on strong leadership, cultural adjustments, and rewards that recognize and reward relationships enhancement with customers and partners, and knowledge sharing. The following six points summarize the crux of leadership and change management issues that are critical for KCRM.

Technology tools are artifacts, not your business’ culture: Successful KCRM initiatives need fundamental readjustment of corporate culture, strong leadership, and financial and nonfinancial reward structures that together gain the hearts and minds of employees and motivate them to share knowledge.

Fear inhibits knowledge sharing: Fear for their job security is a single dominant inhibitor that can keep employees from sharing valuable knowledge to them. Reward structures must be reset to recognize and reward employees for sharing their knowledge and expertise with colleagues, customers, and channel partners. Building a knowledge-sharing culture in your business begins with linking knowledge sharing to personal rewards for employees and partners, encouraging risk taking and educating and addressing people before technology problems.

The Customer Relationship Visionary’s responsibilities span technology and organizational culture issues: Customer relationship visionaries must champion customer knowledge management and relationship building, help devise appropriate metrics, eliminate collaborative impediments and technical barriers, integrate business processes, and support change management to put KCRM embodying culture in place.

Culture change cannot be mandated: Customer support representatives, marketing managers, corporate sponsors, senior management, KCRM proponents, early adopters and zealots, and cynics must all be included. Repeatedly highlight evidence that links performance improvements to new practices; explain where the old culture came from, and why it served your business well then but how it is no longer helpful.

The five touchstones: Five fundamental touchstones must be kept in mind 1.Setting reasonable expectations 2.Using these expectations to arrive at requirements, 3.Stabilizing procedures and then moving on to processes, 4. Accuracy in assessing resource inputs and time frames, 5.Alignment of reward systems and economic incentives.

Encourage customer centricity: Encourage employees to truly think like their customers by encouraging identification and differentiation among customers, managing expectations through internal and external metrics, and viewing complaints and problems as learning opportunities.Successfully imbibing these norms in your organization’s culture, practices, and work will provide the complementary assets that can help you build networks of accessible knowledge and lasting relationships with customers and channels partners- assets that provide inimitable advantage to traditional and e-businesses alike.