Do you know who your REAL 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. And the reason is that the commercial, end user customers are often not those getting their enhanced value in these projects.
When tough decisions need to made, new stakeholders rock up on stage, often appear out of nowhere, stating their wishes. Wishes that piggy-back on the CRM project. They range from extra functionality, complete process reviews, re-organisations, cost cutting, lay-offs to hidden agendas in political warfare. Wishes that may emerge from people’s professional pride, IT architecture limitations, software standards, shareholder value, financial controllers, partners, resellers, outsourced suppliers, consultants, developers, users, process managers, subject matter gurus, statistical analysts or vice presidents.
Being influential in the company and in the project, is a passport to getting these wishes turned into reality.
Sadly, this often results in a small monster which is difficult to upgrade, costs too much money, needs to be run by even less people, provides less transparency because of all the exceptions and workarounds (my pet hate, see trackback) and makes really nobody happy anymore.
If you knowingly or unknowingly denounce your real customer, the one that buys the product or service, everyone else will quickly fill the spot.
And I mean everyone. It sounds like a party, but the hangover will stay with you for a long time.
Who is your customer?
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