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

Comments

[Kate @ crm software]

Well laid out and summarized. The consumers information should always be at the core of any customer orientated decision, that's where a lot of business go wrong.

[Patty Seybold]

Graham,
Unfortunately, for most U.S. based companies, the two disciplines are not always aligned. Customer experience management typically deals with improving the end-to-end customer experience--across functional silos and touchpoints. (And yes, there are LOTS of organizational and technology challenges to overcome). But "CRM Initiatives" in many U.S. firms are essentially technology projects in which the holy grail is to pull together all the information about customers in order to have the proverbial "360-degree" view of the customer. People talk about CRM initiatives as being part of larger CRM strategies, e.g., customer segmentation, ability to deliver a more personalized experience and an attempt to pull together customer-impacting information across sales, service and marketing. My point, like yours, is that CRM and CEM ARE two sides of the coin. But perhaps more importantly, CRM should be about giving customers the information THEY need (not about giving us the information we need) and about delivering a great, seamless experience as they interact with our brands across all depts., channels, partners, touchpoints and processes.

Thanks for your thoughts!

[Graham Hill]

Patty

An interesting post. Particularly the implicit suggestion that Customer Experíence Management (at your client) is significantly different from Customer Relationship Management. How did your client ever manage his Customer Experíence Management job if he didn't also have to grapple with "technology and organizational challenges"?

In reality, Customer Experíence Management and Customer Relationship Management are just two sides of the same coin. Complete with much the same challenges.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant
Interim CRM Consultant