The customer portfolio
In order to be effective, BRM must maintain up-to-date information on its customers. It needs to understand who the customer really is, particularly in larger customer organisations where the real customers and decision makers may not be the same as the primary service users. In order to understand the value of services to the customer organisation and the impact of service changes, the service provider needs solid information on service users and on how the customer’s business depends on the services that they receive. The provider needs information to assess the value of specific customers to its own business based on past and predicted usage and revenue streams. This will influence BRM decisions on the resources a provider will dedicate to BRM for specific customers. Knowledge of the customer’s strategy and business plans enables BRM to position itself, in terms of resources and capabilities, to deal with changing customer demand. BRM should gather and maintain all this information in a customer portfolio, an information base that logically contains sufficient customer information to provide effective BRM.