Outside Innovation

Revisiting CRM: What is it really?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a topic that our clients continue to raise. Everyone continues to complain about having imperfect information about their customers, silo’d customer experiences, and a lack of ability to make relevant offers to the right people at the right time. CRM continues to be a holy grail. Most organizations mount a new campaign to attain the holy grail of achieving a perfect “360-degree view of our customers” about once every five or six years.

Recently, one of our clients—who has done a great job in improving customer experience for customer-critical processes—was “rewarded” for his accomplishments by being handed a new challenge this Fall. He has been asked to head up his firm’s CRM strategy initiative.

My reaction was, “Oh no! Do you really want to do that? That’s a thankless task. It’s highly political. It’s fraught with technology and organizational challenges. Most companies go about it in the wrong way and waste millions of dollars and lots of effort.” He replied, “I know. We’ve already tried this four times in the 20 years that I’ve been with this company. But I’m probably the only person who could pull it off. I’m coming at it from the customers’ point of view.” That attitude encouraged me and I promised to help him on his quest.

So I looked through the papers that we had written about CRM in the past, and decided that it was time to refresh one of my earlier reports on this topic. Much of my thinking remains the same: the best way to approach the challenge of CRM is to think about it as a strategy that will enable your customers to manage their relationships with you, and as a supporting infrastructure that lets you manage and continuously improve the experiences that customers have with your brand.

Rethinking CRM: Provide Customers the Information They Care about in a Seamless Fashion
Customers Don’t Want to Be Managed; They Do Want Good Experiences and Outcomes

A Story about Georgia and Ossetia

The current conflict between Russia and Georgia, involving the desire of the Ossetians for autonomy, and complicated, as usual, by economic interests, have brought to mind a story that was told to me in the early 1990s by John Mroz, the President of the Institute for East West Studies (IEWS). The IEWS is a unique, impartial, and important behind-the-scenes mediator in many global affairs and a source of well-informed, influential, and objective subject matter experts who work tirelessly to promote peace, to avoid conflicts, and to help resolve them.

Before I relay John’s story, let me add that I have no real understanding of the complexities involved in this (or any other) major global conflict, but I am comforted by the fact that there are organizations, like IEWS, working behind the scenes to sort out the issues and to bring this conflict to a rapid and satisfactory conclusion.

John Mroz is, among other things, an expert on Russia, and was able to predict, in the early 90s, the set of events that would transpire after the break up of the Soviet Union. I am still grateful for the opportunity to listen to him as he described how the next 20 years would unfold. Everything he described in the strategy co-design meeting his team held at my home in Boothbay, Maine, 16 years ago, has come to pass.

John told me this story in 1992. He described a dinner he had had with Edvard Schevernadze and his wife, Nanuli, at their home in Georgia. This was one of many such dinners that had taken place over the years. The two men enjoyed comparing notes on world affairs and what was going on in Russia and Georgia. Throughout the dinner, Nanuli remained largely silent, listening and enjoying the spirited conversation. But when John Mroz raised the Ossetian question, she lost her composure. She put down her wine glass and slammed her hand on the table. “It’s terrible,” she exclaimed! “You know how hospitable we Georgians are,” she said. “We open our homes up to anyone. We provide wonderful food and go out of our way to make sure you’re comfortable. But the Ossetians,” she said, “have overstayed their welcome.”

“What if, in the middle of a terrible storm, a bedraggled family turned up at your door in the middle of the night?” she asked rhetorically. “Of course, you would let them in and welcome them with food and warm clothes and a bed by the fire. That’s what we did with the Ossetians. But then they stayed for 600 years!” And she slammed her hand down on the table again, shaking the glassware.

That story has stuck with me for years. It speaks to the long-held cultural and tribal rivalries that are part of the human condition. Office politics and intractable organizational issues seem pretty petty in the light of these kinds of cultural challenges. On the other hand, it’s part of what makes us human—to struggle with passionate us/them feelings of belonging and exclusion.

Being Where Your Customers Are / Supporting the Flow of Content and Data: The Importance of Community Platform Integration

By Matthew Lees, Vice President and Analyst / Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Leveraging the potential of online communities and social media means:

1. Engaging customers with your brand and helping them hold informed and meaningful conversations about your company, your products, and your services wherever these conversations may arise. Your corporate Web site might be the center of your online universe, but it’s not the center of theirs. Sure, they come to your company-sponsored community, but they’re also talking about you in the other B2B and B2C communities they frequent, at social and professional networking sites, and inside the firewall on their company’s intranet.

2. Getting customer-related data to flow easily and appropriately between your own applications. Their data is in their community profiles and in your HR, CRM, sales automation, and other systems.

Integrating applications that share community content and customer data helps deliver on this potential. Integration is all about getting content to move in and out of the community, quickly and securely, to wherever else it may need to be…perhaps your corporate Web site, your service and support application, your CRM system, Facebook or LinkedIn, or wherever else your customers and their data are.

More and more companies are successfully integrating community content and data with other systems and networks. Here are a few examples:

• GlobalTravelBlog.com gives traveler enthusiasts an interactive, map-based interface for finding posts of interest from experienced travelers. The social media platform provider Awareness built this mashup to integrate community content with Google Maps.

• Neutrogena lets its customers participate in its “Beautiful For Good” community directly from Facebook, via an integrated application created by LiveWorld, its community platform provider. If you’re a Facebook aficionado, you don’t need to leave Facebook and go to the Beautiful For Good site to participate.

• Logitech helps its customers find answers and solutions—whether these reside in its own extensive knowledgebase or in its community forums—by integrating its community platform (Lithium) and its knowledge management system (RightNow Service). Search for “mouse problem,” and you’ll be returned a single page that shows relevant and ranked matches in both the Lithium-powered community and the RightNow-powered knowledgebase. No more searching both areas separately. This integration also helps Logitech’s support agents ensure there are no unanswered questions in the discussion forums and lets them easily turn effective customer-created solutions into more formal knowledgebase articles.

What Is Green Engineering?

“Green Engineering is the use of advanced measurement and control techniques to design, develop, and improve products and technologies resulting in environmental and economic benefits.”¹ The good news is that, just as environmental issues are becoming more and more critical to humankind, we now have affordable technologies that enable us monitor and manage our (bio-)systems, reduce the greenhouse gases we emit, lower the amount of energy we consume, and thereby reduce our costs while benefiting our planet. Every engineer is becoming a “green engineer” because all of us are now intent on reducing carbon footprints and in saving money by reducing the energy consumption of the products and processes we design and control.

How Is Green Engineering Done?

Today, an increasing number of scientists and engineers are designing complex feedback and control systems that enable them to:

1. Monitor multiple data feeds from a myriad of sensors that detect and capture analog signals (temperature, humidity, pH, gases, chemicals) in real time.

2. Analyze these streams of input in near real time.

3. Correlate the relationships among the inputs to create a dynamic model of a complex system.

4. Take compensating or corrective actions by sending signals to trigger actions based on real-time events, triggers, and thresholds.

Using Distributed Sensing Technologies to Understand Complex Systems

I just finished a research project on “green engineering.” I interviewed pioneering “lead users” who have been designing new approaches to solving tough environmental problems using affordable, easy-to-deploy sensors and holistic feedback systems. I learned from a Malaysian mechanical engineer how he was able to monitor and control commercial air conditioning systems in the tropics to reduce his clients’ energy consumption by 30%. I learned from a PhD chemist and a controls engineer how they were able to design a zero emissions hydrogen-powered switching locomotive from commercially-available components and to develop a complex control system to keep it running safely. And I followed the story of a group of 24 biologists, engineers, and computer scientists as they teamed across two continents to model and monitor an unusually salty chain of lakes in Argentina.

What struck me as I completed this project (which was a “green engineering” white paper for National Instruments) was that the approaches these engineers and scientists are taking to address specific issues while saving our planet may be relevant for other kinds of businesses as well.

 

How Has Ecommerce Evolved over a Decade?

If you read Mitch Kramer’s detailed product review of IBM’s WebSphere Commerce solution this week, you’ll get a good feel for how much is involved in delivering a mature, full-featured e-commerce platform. This is part of a series of B2C e-commerce evaluations against Mitch’s equally mature and complete B2C ecommerce solutions’ evaluation framework. The framework itself provides a good snapshot of all the capabilities you’d expect to find in a modern ecommerce platform.

IBM has been in the ecommerce business for 12 years, and its ecommerce platform has evolved with its merchants’ and customers’ requirements. This year, IBM has introduced a Software as a Service (SaaS) version of its ecommerce platform, which it makes available to smaller businesses through a myriad of partners. The pricing for the SaaS offering is based on your sales volume. So, if you’re a smaller business or if you don’t want to run an in-house ecommerce operation (or have IBM host it for you), you may still be able to afford a full-featured and very mature ecommerce platform.

What are the things that online merchants value now in their selection of an ecommerce platform or service? For example, many of today’s offerings now include modern “Web 2.0” features, including rich interactive GUIs that enable customers to interact and iterate without clicking through a lot of pages. Today’s online merchants want to reduce costs by ensuring that online customers can serve themselves throughout their buying lifecycle (explore, select, purchase, manage, maintain) without needing to pick up the phone in order to complete a transaction or to unscramble a problem.

What Are the Most Important Factor(s) in Your Selection of an Ecommerce Solution? Click here to take our quick poll:

Ecommerce: A Decade of Learning

It’s been 10 years since I first published Customers.com to chronicle best practices in “making it easy for customers to do business with you” on the Internet and beyond. It seems an appropriate time to reflect on how far we’ve come in selling our wares and serving customers via the Internet. There are still some businesses that don’t have or seem to need Web sites. For example, most of the small convenience and specialty stores we find in neighborhoods, particularly those in the developing world, don’t have ecommerce sites. On the flip side, there are countless boutique businesses around the world that have succeeded because they’ve been able to extend their reach through their clever use of the Web both to promote their wares and to make it easy for customers to shop online.

What Matters to Ecommerce Customers? What makes a good online shopping experience for you? Click here to take our quick poll:

a) It’s easy to find products that meet my criteria quickly.

b) The products I need are available in my timeframe.

c) I can easily compare and contrast similar products.

d) I can read and trust other customers’ reviews.

e) I can complete a purchase with very few steps.

f) I trust the integrity of the merchant and the quality of the products on offer.

g) I know that I’m getting a fair price.

h) I know that the products will be delivered on time.

i) I know that it will be easy to return or exchange.

j) Other?