Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) encompasses the processes and systems for managing interactions with customers throughout their lifecycle, from initial lead qualification through ongoing account management. This use case addresses the complexity of B2B account hierarchies, contact relationship networks, multi-touchpoint interaction tracking, sales pipeline management, and forecasting, with particular emphasis on integrating legal entity information to understand corporate customer structures and relationships.

The Challenge

Organizations face significant challenges in CRM:

• B2B complexity — Need to know everything about legal entities you do business with, including their structures, ownership, and relationships
• B2C complexity — Need to understand which legal entities private customers are affiliated with (employers, board positions, investments)
• Data fragmentation — Customer and relationship data scattered across sales, marketing, service, and other systems
• Relationship complexity — Understanding relationships across the customer lifecycle from lead to prospect to customer
• Multi-touchpoint tracking — Tracking interactions across multiple channels and touchpoints
• Account hierarchies — Managing complex B2B account structures with parent companies, subsidiaries, and decision-making units
• Contact relationships — Understanding who the key contacts are within accounts and their roles
• Sales pipeline visibility — Maintaining accurate pipeline and forecasting across teams and territories

Traditional CRM systems operate in silos and lack the integrated view needed for comprehensive customer relationship understanding, especially when dealing with complex B2B entity structures.

Why EKG is Required

Enterprise Knowledge Graphs provide powerful CRM capabilities:

• Unified customer view — Connect all customer and relationship information across systems, channels, and time periods
• Legal entity integration — Seamlessly integrate with Legal Entity Management for comprehensive B2B account information
• Relationship understanding — Graph structure naturally represents customer relationships, account hierarchies, and contact networks
• Real-time updates — Federated approach enables real-time updates from any source system
• Cross-system queries — Semantic relationships enable queries across CRM, legal entity, and other systems without data movement
• Account hierarchy modeling — Model complex B2B account structures and relationships
• Contact network analysis — Understand contact relationships and influence within and across accounts
• Pipeline analytics — Analyze sales pipeline and forecasting across multiple dimensions using graph queries

Business Value

• Improved sales effectiveness — Better understanding of customers and accounts enables more effective sales strategies
• Increased revenue — Better pipeline management and customer understanding leads to increased sales
• Better customer experience — Unified view enables personalized and consistent customer experiences
• Reduced sales cycle — Better qualification and relationship understanding reduces time to close
• Account growth — Understanding account structures and relationships enables account expansion strategies
• Operational efficiency — Automated relationship tracking and reduced manual data entry

Components

• Lead Management
• Lead Qualification
• Opportunity Management
• Sales Pipeline
• Forecasting
• Account Management
• Account Relationships
• Contact Management
• Contact Relationships
• Activity Management
• Interactions

Related Use Cases

Customer Relationship Management depends on and integrates with several other use cases:

• Legal Entity Management - Essential for B2B account management, CRM uses Legal Entity Management to understand corporate customer structures, ownership, relationships, and entity hierarchies. This is critical for managing complex B2B accounts and understanding which legal entities customers are affiliated with in B2C scenarios.

• Know Your Customer (KYC) - CRM uses KYC data for customer onboarding, risk assessment, and compliance during the sales process. KYC information helps qualify leads and assess customer risk before engagement.

• Vendor Management - Vendor relationships share patterns with customer relationships. CRM can leverage similar relationship management approaches for managing vendor relationships, and understanding vendor networks can inform customer relationship strategies.

Shared Concepts

Customer Relationship Management uses these shared reference data concepts:

• Countries - Geographic reference data for customer and account location
• Jurisdictions - Legal and regulatory jurisdictions for compliance in customer relationships
• Regions - Geographic regions for sales territory and account analysis

These shared concepts are also used by Legal Entity Management, Know Your Customer, and other use cases.