Archive for November, 2009

Do you know who your REAL customer is?

Do you know who your customer is? In commerce today, there's a lot of lip-service to CRM, Customer Relationship Management. Millions of Euros, Dollars, Pounds and Yens are spent every year on SAP CRM, Oracle Siebel CRM, SaaS CRM, SalesForce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a lot of other related CRM software architectures. Either the money is well spent and the projects deliver enhanced customer value or they don't, or somewhere in between. For those that don't deliver the desired enhanced customer value - as is the case in some 50% of them in my experience - usually there is an enormous lack of customer focus. How can that be? Lack of customer focus in a CRM project? How can we miss the 'C' in CRM that blatantly? We do[ READ MORE ]

Still not getting the basics right.

Yesterday I referred to not having been treated as I think a customer should. With service and respect. And wouldn’t you believe it. This morning I stroll into a huge retail outlet specialising in elecronics to buy a camera. They have just opened, so shop attendants are still standing around doing nothing, talking, joking with each [ READ MORE ]

Come and go with a smile. A pre-condition.

Has it happened to you too recently that you are in shop, restaurant or some other venue and you receive what I call ‘reluctant service‘? That service received from someone whose entire being clearly communicates: ‘I’d rather be at home on the couch in my pyjamas than talking to you, jackass.’ Not that there is anything [ READ MORE ]

Social Networks are ‘organising the world’s people’. Start Nudging your Network Niches.

Slowly but surely social media sites are indeed organising the world’s people. They are creating cyberspace groups or tribes or stakeholder maps of like-minded people. Just to name a few, LinkedIn, MySpace,Yahoo and Twitter are no longer just networks of connected friends. They are becoming influential overlays of groups of people who can approach the web together. Through instant [ READ MORE ]

Salesforce, Oracle Siebel, SAP CRM, Salesforce, it doesn’t matter

Countless CRM projects have completely missed their mark, and continue to do so. Organisations decide it's time to see over the way they deal with their customer and jump straight into software selection. They involve consultancy firms who claim to have built an understanding of 'CRM Industry best practise', and they start configuring right away. No CRM software can deliver benefit to the organisation or the customer if you do not first very clearly decide what you want. Do you want the smooth phone/CRM integration for managing customer interactions that Avaya/Siebel Oracle can provide you? Is integration with Outlook and other Microsoft products important for you and do you want an easy setup that Microsoft CRM Dynamics can give you? Are you after quick wins with SalesForce? What is the business case for your CRM investment? Can you afford on Premise, on Demand, customised or not? What does your business process in Marketing, Sales, Delivery and Service look like? Where does it work well, where does it not? What will you automate and what will remain manual? [ READ MORE ]

Relationskipping, Relationworshipping – it all depends on the market.

Those of us who have been working in the CRM arena for a while get a bit tunnel-visioned, I must admit. We talk, eat, and dream CRM to try to achieve that ultimate goal of complete customer satisfaction and everything that goes with it. It's easy to forget that of course the market, industry and type of business you are in determines just how influential your customer relationship really is and what the ideal composition of it should be. As a hobby, I have run a Christmas tree plantation for some 11 years now. I decided I would start a business selling a product I knew nothing about, in a market equally unfamiliar. I met hands on with challenges such as finding a field, baby trees, a planting machine, putting up a fence to keep the baby trees safe from rabbits. They were tough challenges, as I had to build up everything from scratch, including a production/source network. Now the standard 'old fashioned' christmas tree takes about 5-7 years to reach a height of 5-7 feet tall, about a foot a year[ READ MORE ]

Customer Retention Tension

It's in our human nature to be drawn to the excitement of new things. Same thing applies to commerce. New customers and new orders from existing customers are the coolest of all things commercial. They rule. Most organisations when they talk CRM have fantasies of a business process architecture with supporting software and integration built to drive in more sales from new customers. The intention to make life better for existing customers is usually there as well, but always gets less focus. It's because the business case for investing in customer rentention is a fuzzy one[ READ MORE ]

Oracle Siebel, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SAP CRM? Take your pick.

ake your choice! But not just yet. I have stood in front of many audiences, proudly presenting the workings of their new CRM software. In all cases, the road to that moment of presenting the final result has been a struggle. What preceded these presentations was usually months of analysis, process documentation and improvements, political and organisational alignment and lots more malarchy of that kind. [ READ MORE ]

Let the facts rule and start ‘Relationskipping’.

The customer is calling the shots. And unless your customer has too much time and/or money, time will be better spent updating on market movements to achieve the ultimate commercial deal. Creating exactly that, the ‘’ultimate commercial deal’ is what businesses should be spending time on instead. Continue to deliver this to your customer , ahead of the competition, combined with a complete 360 degree overview of your customer’s interactions and ongoing business, and you can let the facts speak for themselves so that you can skip investing in the relationship. In such reassuring conditions, you will be able to ’relationskip’. [ READ MORE ]

Self-service or ‘Shelf-service’? Get it right first time.

Self-service is one of the major areas where organisations are going to score major CRM points if they get it right. If they don't, they can do more damage than they could ever imagine. Get it right, first time as it is incredibly powerful in creating a personal customer experience and will shape customer opinion for a long time to come[ READ MORE ]

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