PDF A fundamental flaw with CRM and the reason that CRM has never reached the level of value that it was touted to provide is that you cannot have a relationship with a system.
CRM does have its place, though. Fundamentally, organizations need to manage the “data” side of customer relationships. Having a centralized place to manage the transactional data is one of the key foundations for the growth and scale of business. CRM systems along with data warehousing systems and others provide a fundamental foudation for providing clear information about running the business.
The challenge is that the systems are business-centric & not customer-centric. We design and build our business systems to run our business, but we don’t necessarily put the customer in the middle. In many larger organizations, with lots of products, markets, segments, etc.; the customer is left to cobble together their own customer experience.
I like the concept of “customer experience management” a great deal. My work in social media is a definitely parallel to the pioneering work done to bring the business closer to the customer. I also like what the folks in email marketing are doing to become multi-channel communications platforms. At the end of the day, the closer you can come to meeting the individual customers needs throughout the customer lifecycle, the better. Even better, integrating the customer touchpoints into a cohesive single point of contact.
To me the analogy to golf works. Most companies, by definition, provide mediocre customer experience. Analogous to landing in the rough. The companies that work on trying to improve customer experience through automation are getting the ball in the fairway. The companies that can figure out how to get their employees, partners, customers, and prospects to interact in a more organic way, putting the customer experience at the heart of the customer lifecycle have a better chance to get it on the green.
The best companies that are getting closer to the pin leverage business intelligence, multi-channel communications platforms, online communities, semantic technologies, and Web 2.0 technologies in conjunction with their current infrastuctures to bring a better customer experience to the table. If you can put a more usable front end to the half-dozen to the Enterprise Content Management systems that are common in a larger organization, you could really assist the organization to bridge across the multiple departments that touch a customer, as an example.
Let’s face it, the company that provides me a better “user interface”, is easier to do business with, provides better targeted recommendations, educates me without asking for a sale, provides access to information and other buyers to assist in my decision making, is transparent in their billing and packaging, connects me to a competent customer service person, and delivers value beyond the price of the product gets my loyalty.
None of this is difficult to strategize, but if it was easy, every company would do it. The challenge is prioritizing in a limited resource environment. At the end of the day, customer experience management is not a destination, but a journey.
