Customer_Building_Blocks

Customer Relationship Building Blocks

The Customer Relationship Building Blocks represent a view into the "Dynamic Business Model" that encompasses the entities, relationships and attributes that provide the enterprise-wide knowledgebase for customer management (Figure 1). Based on the premise that just to be in business, an organization must make fundamental decisions about the products and services they to offer, the markets they want to compete in, how they will keep track of their finances and resource usage and how they want to do business, represented by their business processes. What emerges are seven sibling subject areas that represent the DNA of any organization (Table 1).

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Figure 1: Customer Relationship Building Blocks

Subject Area	Definition
Business Party	The People and Organizations and the relationships that exist between them that are of interest to the organization for any reason
Business Processes	The specifications for the business processes the organization performs to support daily operations and monitor the health of the organization, including all aspects of event handling and tracking.
Finance	The specifications that describe how the organization will manage its financial resource.
Locators	Information used to locate and communicate with business parties (e.g. Addresses, Phone Numbers and E-Mail Addresses) or find a specific geographic location.
Market Segments	The specifications that describe the markets in which the organization wishes to conduct its business.
Offerings	The specifications for the products and services that are offered in the market place.
Resource Usage	The specifications that describe the resources the organization needs to conduct business (e.g. human, equipment, real estate) and the mechanisms that will be used to track resource consumption.

Table 1: Sibling Subject Areas

The customer relationship subject area represents the business classes of interest in managing customer relationships. As such, it focuses only on that aspect of the dynamic business model supporting customer management. What goes on inside another subject area and the interrelationships between the sibling is outside the scope of customer relationship management. Likewise, other major business roles, such as vendor, employee, shareholder and regulator, have their own view into the dynamic business model.

The Customer subject area consists of only one business class, the Customer Portfolio that serves as the glue between all the customer links to the seven building block subject areas. The customer subject area also manages the links those subject areas. However, the associated subject area controls the business rules that dictate the behavior of these link business classes. For example, the structure and behavior of accounts is defined by the Finance subject area, while Service Agreements mimic the structure of Offerings. In essence, the customer relationship link classes must mirror the structure of their associated subject area.

Subject Area Link	Subject Area	Definition
Stakeholder Roles	Business Party	The role that the business party assumes with respect to some component of the customer portfolio.
Points of Contact	Locators	The points of contact to be used for the business party in a specific stakeholder role.
Service Agreements	Offerings	The specification of the terms and conditions, including the configuration and pricing of specific offerings within the umbrella of the customer portfolio.
Service Requests	Business Processes and Resource Usage	The business events that impact some component of the customer portfolio and the participants in those events.
Opportunities	Market Segments and Offerings	The business plans necessary to attract new customers or enhance the relationship with existing ones, including all aspects of campaign development and tracking.
Accounts	Finance	The record of the financial events that have occurred or are planned to occur that impact some component of the customer portfolio.
Customer Portfolios	Market Segments	Identifies those customer portfolios that qualify for inclusion in market segments.

Table 2: Customer Relationship Subject Area Link Classes

The customer relationship building blocks can be used as a framework that can facilitate the process of identifying business rules. Business rule analysis sessions for customer relationship management can be structured into a series of questions:

Who are your customers (People? Organizations?)

What Interpersonal Relationships are you interested in (household membership? organization structure?)

Which points of contacts are of interest to you about your customers (address? phone? e-mail?)

What Customer Portfolio components do you require to deliver your offering (service agreements? accounts?)

What stakeholder roles can be assumed with respect to those business items (owner? cardholder? signer? decision maker?)

What business events are performed to deliver your offerings to your customers (campaigns? sales calls? customer service offering setup? financial activities?)

What profile items do you need access to about your customers?

With this approach, you are optimizing the probability that the business rules are stated in a manner that can easily be configured within the Dynamic Business Model.