7 C’s of Customer Relationship Management

WalkMe Team
By WalkMe Team
Updated June 20, 2025

The 7 C’s of customer relationship management—customer centricity, company culture, customer experience, data, journey, consumer experience, and expectation—form a holistic approach. Implementing a CRM as a strategic marketing tool fosters robust customer relationships, increasing profits and revenue growth.

The 7 C’s of Customer Relationship Management

Customer Centricity

This is the idea that being dogmatic about your customers will bring you success. It’s about putting customers at the center of your business and making every decision with their best interest in mind.

Company Culture

Company culture is the personality of your business. This includes how employees interact with customers, how leaders treat employees, and how you behave as a brand towards customers.

Customer Experience

This includes everything from the first time a customer hears about you to the time they engage in your product or service to after they have left an interaction with you. Your customer experience must be memorable and pleasant throughout each step of the process.

Customer Data

How do you know if your customer experience is good? Collect data! Using data, marketers can measure statistics like conversion rates, retention rates, average spending amounts, and more. Then, they can use this data to improve their customer experience.

Customer Journey

The customer journey refers to all the touchpoints along a person’s path to becoming a customer and, eventually, a loyal customer. During this journey, several steps need to be met for someone to become a repeat customer and advocate for your company.

Consumer Experience

The consumer experience is what people remember about interacting with your brand after their first purchase or interaction has ended. It’s how they feel about your brand after doing business with you and how likely they are to buy from you again.

Consumer Expectations

Consumer expectations are what consumers think about when considering interacting with you or buying from you again.  For example, when someone thinks about buying, they expect fast and free shipping options. You may have consistently built up consumer expectations over time by providing those services.

The Value of CRM in Today’s Businesses

Let’s face it. Many businesses are still caught up by the idea that customer relationship management is unnecessary.  

They think it’s an overhyped and overpriced strategy that doesn’t help their bottom line. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. CRM can be the difference between a business thriving or floundering. Businesses that have used customer relationship management to their fullest potential have seen incredible growth in profits and revenue.  

By following the seven C’s of customer relationship management, companies have increased their sales by 25% on average. Why? Because they’ve focused on their customers. 

They’ve prioritized learning about their customers and what they want, what they expect, and how they want to interact with their business.  

Businesses use this data to improve their customer experience over time to attract new customers and keep their existing ones happy. This is because customer relationship management is a strategy for everybody! It doesn’t matter how big or small your company is – you can use CRM to improve your bottom line. 

FAQs
When should CRM teams use journey analytics to enhance customer journey (one of the 7 C’s)?

Deploy analytics after key engagement milestones—onboarding, post-purchase, or churn risk—to uncover friction points and optimize touchpoints for better retention and satisfaction.

Why is integrating cultural alignment (company culture) crucial during CRM platform rollouts?

Aligning CRM tool use with your organization’s values fosters adoption; cultural disconnects lead to inconsistent use, undermining data consistency and customer experience .

How can enterprises balance personalization (consumer experience) with privacy requirements?

Use anonymized data and consent-based profiling to tailor experiences without personal exposure, meeting regulatory standards and maintaining trust .

WalkMe Team
By WalkMe Team
WalkMe pioneered the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) for organizations to utilize the full potential of their digital assets. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning and contextual guidance, WalkMe adds a dynamic user interface layer to raise the digital literacy of all users.