Customer-focused enterprises

Early on in the Acumen Fellowship, Jacqueline told us: "Once you set your intention, the universe conspires with you to achieve it."

I thought about that quote last night, as I was sitting in a SalesForce event at the Taj Deccan. I was hearing all about CRM strategies and ways to make your business successful by better tracking and analyzing your customers.

What's funny is this is exactly the type of work I was doing straight out of undergrad, as a consultant at Braun. After two years there, I decided I wanted to keep doing what I was doing... but apply it to something I was infinitely more passionate about - social enterprises.

What's interesting is how novel that sounded then: treating people as "customers" and not as passive recipients of aid. I went to the Philippines and convinced skeptical leaders of a Catholic MFI to hold customer focus groups to better understand how happy they were with the organization's services. Even my business school interviewer was a skeptic. Reading my business school essay now makes me cringe, but the basic gist is that I wanted to help social enterprises grow their organizations by better understanding their customers.

So Jacqueline's quote comes back now... while I didn't plan on focusing on CRM, my terms of reference as an Acumen fellow were exactly that. It's been really amazing applying those same skills to the work we're doing here. While we're a social enterprise, our attention to customer tracking and customer conversion is just as rigorous as the companies I used to work with as a consultant.

And apparently SalesForce has noticed, for we were just asked to do a case study on the way we track our customers. We were also in a BusinessWorld article last year about our CRM initiatives:

Hyderabad-based LifeSpring Hospitals uses CRM to track customers real time. "We have seen conversion rates improve," says Tricia Morente, head of marketing. For LifeSpring, the biggest benefit has been automation and generation of a database over the Web.

What's interesting is how many of my Braun colleagues within the strategy group have gone on to work in social enterprises... In fact, I just had a phone conversation with a former manager who's now working in Pfizer's emerging markets strategy group, and is now looking into maternal health through a partnership with Grameen.

When I first moved here, many former colleagues laughed when I told them I was working to develop a CRM strategy for our organization. "Can't get enough, eh?" Maybe not. But it's nice to know at least some skills are transferable!