Maybe things would have been different if CRM were shepherded by marketing folks. Often, CRM was driven by the Information Technology folks, in partnership with vendors selling solutions. All too often, the focus was on "Management", not on the "Customer Relationship".
These days, it gets harder and harder to define "CRM". I believe that's a good thing. Here are examples of "CRM" in the year 2007.
- The President of Whole Foods talks directly to his customers via a blog, allowing customers to respond to him.
- Nielsen and Experian enter an alliance to provide "CRM for CPG Companies", promoting use of a series of traditional direct-marketing techniques to traditional brand-marketing organizations.
- Tamara Gielen writes a great blog about using E-Mail to build relationships with customers.
- The American Catalog Mailers Association is formed to protect the craft known as cataloging.
- Google might say they own relationships with customers, by matching customer needs with vendors willing to pay Google the most to meet the needs of a customer.
- Salesforce.com might argue that they provide software that allows folks to manage relationships with clients.
- Do you believe that a "brand" can manage customer relationships? In other words, is the term "CRM" antiquated, given today's marketing environment?
- If you were building a "brand" from scratch, which elements of "CRM" would you use to build your business? E-Mail? Catalogs? RSS? Blogs? Paid Search? What else?
Kevin, thanks for starting the discussion. As I have worked with my clients, often the term "CRM" has been evoked with response to technology. Technology should only be an enabling tool, not the end of the journey.
ReplyDeleteTo me, this isn't so much about what we call it. It is about engaging with your customers in such a way that a relationship grows over time. We can't "manage" our customers and how they react to our business, but we can proactively do a few things: create a strategy to decide how we want to treat our customers, design a customer experience that supports our brand and values, and engage in an interactive dialogue with our customers so we get to know each other better. Peppers and Rogers Group has always talked about creating "learning relationships", where we learn more about our customers with each interaction and we use that learning to improve future interactions. That is a winning idea to me.
CRM, or anything else, works a lot better when we do things with the goal of benefiting the customer!
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