The Ultimate CRM System for Father Christmas

It's getting towards that time of year again, but for me it's a little different. This time, my daughter knows about Father Christmas. She's been asking about him, and she knows that he's going to bring something. My plan to keep Christmas costs down for at least another year appears to be dead in the water. Oh well.

So I started thinking about how Father Christmas would handle the logistics of dealing with the requests from millions of children around the world, and how he would deal with the many processes involved in ordering, making and dispatching presents. Because, of course, Father Christmas is real, and if he is real, he surely must have a CRM solution. Yes?

What on earth is he to do with all those letters?

At work, we're flooded with e-mails, and if they're from clients, we need to ensure that those points of contact are recorded and matched against other interactions. I'm sure Father Christmas has the same problem. In my day, we used to write to Father Christmas, but these days, you can e-mail him with the list of presents you want.

What Father Christmas really needs is a system that lets him maintain contact data at both an individual and a family level. After all, we don't want one child to receive better presents than a brother or sister, so Father Christmas's CRM requires solid data handling.

And what if someone has been naughty?

As we all know, naughty children don't receive their Christmas presents, so the CRM system needs an incident management feature. For example, Father Christmas could work on the "three strikes" principle before the incident is escalated to the elf division who would, ...