The Claritas

“The paper of record for the customer relationship.” — Established at Kuala Lumpur, 2008

The Front Page · Lead Story

Why most CRMs fail their second year — and what the operators who don't are doing instead.

A field guide eighteen years in the making, from the editorial board of Claritas. Audited findings inside.

For eighteen years we have observed, instrumented, and on more than one occasion rebuilt the customer-relationship systems of institutions across Asia-Pacific. The pattern that recurs — across industries, across team sizes, across the reigning fashions in software — is the one we wish we had named earlier.

CRMs do not fail because they lack features. They fail because they were procured as software and operated as furniture. The systems that survive their second year are the ones treated as architecture: opinionated about the work, integrated into the pipe, defended by an operator who understands the building.

In this edition we publish the Customer Architecture Review for MMXXVI: 247 enterprise deployments, audited annually for five years, organised against the question every operator already knows the answer to — does the system give back more than it asks for?

The methodology is at the back. The data are at claritas.asia/data/MMXXVI. What follows is the editorial.

By the Editorial Board · Continued on A4♦ ♦ ♦

Section A · The Practice

Three offices, one house.

The Claritas instrument across marketing, sales, and service.

Marketing

We do not chase. We attend. Every signal weighed, every audience drawn by hand.¹

Read the brief →

II.

Sales

Pipeline as discipline. Forecast as a thing one can stand behind, in any board meeting.²

Read the brief →

III.

Service

Resolution as the only metric that holds. Tickets are accounting. Outcomes are the work.³

Read the brief →

¹ See "On the Practice of Marketing", The Almanac, Vol. XII.

² See "Forecasting as a Discipline", Sec. B, Iss. 4 of MMXXIV.

³ See "What Service Owes the Customer", Editorial, Iss. 218.

Section A · Editorial

From the Editor's desk

By the Founding Partners · KL

We began in 2008 with one client and one question — could software remember not the customer, but the relationship? Eighteen years and sixty-four engagements later, we still measure ourselves against that question.

Claritas remembers the conversation that happened seven years ago, the preference that was mentioned in passing, the relationship that was built before the software existed. We are still a small house. We intend to remain one.

Section A · Engagements

A short ledger of long work.

Selected commissions, MMVIII–MMXXIV.

Of our sixty-four engagements, the four below are the ones the editorial board most often returns to in print. Renewal figures, where applicable, audited by Ernst & Young Singapore.

Year	Commission	Description	Renewed
MMVIII	First commission	A Pahang plantation group, 12 estates, one ledger.	94%
MMXIV	Cross-border architecture	Asia-Pacific telco, 15 markets, one customer record.	100%
MMXIX	The framework	Codified into a 47-page manual. Distributed to clients.	—
MMXXIV	Sixty-fourth engagement	An institutional bank, three years, end to end.	98%

♦ For Subscribers Only ♦

The full Customer Architecture Review,
by post — and by appointment.

Subscribers receive the quarterly print edition by post, full access to the underlying dataset, and may request an editorial board briefing.

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Why most CRMs fail their second year — and what the operators who don't are doing instead.

Three offices, one house.

Marketing

Sales

Service

From the Editor's desk

A short ledger of long work.

The full Customer Architecture Review,by post — and by appointment.

The full Customer Architecture Review,
by post — and by appointment.