Welcome back! We hope you enjoyed the holiday break. Now let’s continue with something new! Something that concretizes how standardized workflows are worked into a company. As we established last time an example for implementing Third Party Due Diligence as a Shared Service can be the following: customers with questionable motives get sorted out by a workflow system that automatically shares all available information within the company.

And here comes the big “but”. Of course, CRM is about a lot more than just sorting out risky deals. So, a standardized workflow has to achieve that but many other things as well. It has to go to the very root of the problem and in our case, that is the sheer number of departments in a big company. All these departments have their own responsibilities and working habits but often are not as effectively connected as should be.

So, let’s try another example with a prospective customer approaching a company to purchase a certain sensitive product of sorts. He will therefore have to answer a certain set of questions before a deal can be made. As is standard in every big company. In theory every local account manager is now tasked with finding the right department responsible for checking the customer request. For example, verifying credit-worthiness. That takes time and is inefficient.

What are we going to do about that? Well, standardizing the questionnaire process helps to simplify and optimize the use of all available customer information. Entering information into a supportive IT system will now automatically trigger a process that evaluates which department is suited for handling the customer’s request. The prospect of financial struggles as well as costly sales and compliance issues can now be identified without the need for complicated search processes. So, what a standardized workflow accomplishes eventually regarding Third-Party-Management is to make communication between departments easier and efficient in a way, that it helps maximize profit while also adhering to global economic rules and local compliance requirements.

And that was our last post on Customer Risk Management. Click here to check out our YouTube video which expands on the topic in more detail. We will be back next week with an all new aspect of the Shared Service system, so stay tuned …