By Tom Richards
Business is so quick to embrace the latest buzz phrase in their quest for customer loyalty--but a phrase does not make a strategy. Bob Thompson, president of CRM Guru, has just pronounced CRM dead and has changed the name of his company to Customer-Think. Goes to show you, don't name a company after a buzz phrase.
Bob's not alone, of course. Others are declaring CRM dead. Too many cost overruns, poor workflows, disgruntled employees and unhappy customers, they say.
What's the new buzz phrase?
Why, it's the new kid on the block, CEM--Customer Experience Management. Harvard Business Review just did a comparison of the differences between CRM and CEM. I'm sure you're all breathless with anticipation, so here goes. HBR says this: "CRM steps in when there is a record of a customer interaction. CEM occurs at the point of interaction. As for future performance, CRM drives cross-selling by bundling products in demand with others that aren't. CEM locates places to add offerings in the gaps between expectations and experience."
If you don't get it, don't blame me! As I analyze all the buzz phrases about how to get a customer's business and keep on getting it, I think I have isolated the problem with any of these processes working in any size company. The problem is the word "management." Take that out of the equation and you have the strategic potential of customer satisfaction through training. Management is the problem. Why do these strategies have to be "managed"? A good training program focusing on methods of teaching employees how to build customer relationships, create customer experiences and simply and coherently offering information that develops customer loyalty doesn't need management; it needs a good trainer.
As an example, maybe we should call all of these phrases Customer Experience Training. Then, maybe, management will stay the hell out of it. Am I anti-management, no. I used to be one. But I am anti-management-getting-in-the-way of simple, straightforward programs that should be engineered by people who are on the front-lines and know what is needed to provide customer satisfaction. It’s personal; it’s not mass-produced.
CET--now that’s a strategy.
Tom Richards is president of 1 on 1 strategies inc in Santa Fe. He has been a customer communications and guest satisfaction consultant for 27 years.
I’m 100 percent in Tom’s camp on this one. Having spent way too many years working for and with technology companies, I was often struck by that industry’s desire to take a common-sense task – say, keeping all your prospects’ phone numbers in one place – and automate it, manage it, scale it, and then complicate it.
Of course, a lot of these “solutions” didn’t work because none of the users were trained. And most of the target audience only wanted the basic set of features, so companies were put off by the fact that they spent wads of money to buy a sophisticated CRM package only to learn that most users were using it as a Rolodex, and not much else.
To add onto Tom’s suggestion that we move toward Customer Experience Training, I suggest that the best people to lead that training are customers who leave a store without buying anything or take sales call after sales call without every buying. Get them to tell you what’s wrong with your customer experience or your communication style, and then you’ll have something to manage.
Posted by: Peter Cohen | May 17, 2007 at 01:33 PM