Cranfield School of Management

Cranfield Customer Management Forum

In association with IBM Global Business Services

The Cranfield Customer Management Forum is a club of organisations from a wide range of sectors who are together driving forward best practice in customer management across marketing, sales and customer service

Director: Professor Hugh Wilson

The Importance of Customer Management

As markets mature and globalise and competition intensifies, customer management becomes the principal source of sustainable competitive advantage. As more and more firms appreciate this, the individual components of customer management, such as CRM, multi-channel marketing and sales management, remain necessary but become insufficient on their own.

What is needed is the capability to synthesise business processes in marketing, sales and customer service into an overall excellence in customer management. As exemplary companies demonstrate, only this synthesis can lead to superior customer and shareholder value.

Cranfield’s Contribution

Cranfield has a long history of working with leading edge organisations to develop valuable ideas and new insights into current and future business practice. We do this by bringing together specialists and pioneering thinkers from academia and across industry sector boundaries and facilitating the discussions that lead to mutual learning.

The Cranfield Customer Management Forum, run in association with IBM Global Business Services, is just such a group of companies who share a common objective to:

• extend their understanding of customer management techniques used in today’s business environment
• develop practical techniques for business improvement
• share practice and experience with a supportive group of peers from a range of sectors
• investigate and identify excellent practice through Cranfield research
• Solve immediate problems in customer management through informal networking