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CRM Software, Contact Centre & Marketing Software

In the frame: Michael Collins, Database Marketing Counsel (March 2012)

Organisations planning to introduce CRM tend to agonise initially over three significant concerns. In no particular order these are ‘getting the specification right’, ‘obtaining buyin from all stakeholders to ensure universal adoption’ and ‘making sure that data is used effectively’. There is also often uncertainty as to what CRM is and what it can mean to the business. The business must satisfy itself that it is in fact ready for CRM! This can be done by some internal considerations such as “Is operational data being held in more than one repository?”, “Can we address customers’ needs to manage their own activities and learn with active empowerment rather than being passive recipients?” and “Can we set and monitor universal KPIs?”.

All change: Laurence Buchanan, Capgemini (December 2011)

The last five to 10 years have been characterised by a communications revolution. During that time we have seen the mass rollout of broadband and mobile broadband, an explosion of new hardware devices that tap into that connectivity, as well as an increase of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, apps and social networking sites that have transformed the way people interact with data and processes. Together, these changes have given users unprecedented access to information and connectivity to peers, transforming the way we both complete tasks and conduct the many different types of relationships from consumer to employee to supplier. Fundamental human behaviours may not have changed much – we have always been ‘social’ – what has changed, however, is connectivity, access, transparency, speed and scale.

Expect better: Darron Walton, De Villiers Walton (November 2011)

No matter how hard you try, without the right foundations most customer relationship management tools are destined to underachieve. As a recent UK-wide poll revealed, two-thirds of CRM users rate their current return on investment as only average, due to often ‘slow’ and ‘complex’ systems. In our experience, just as business users need quality information to effectively perform marketing activities and provide good customer sales and service, similarly the advanced functionality contained in most CRM systems can only be optimised if fundamental IT structures are in place and the data which underpins the business processes has been implemented properly. To understand the issues faced by UK CRM users and the complexities associated with CRM investments, De Villiers Walton recently conducted a survey of 252 UK users.

Minefield that is social media: Louise McGrath, Big Dot Media (October 2011)

Not so long ago, when social media first came onto the scene, it was seen as being only for people with too much time on their hands and nothing better to do. But today there are over 700 million Facebook members, with more than 500 million ‘active’ users, 50% of whom log on at least once a day. People spend over 700 billion minutes a month on Facebook, with the average user creating 90 pieces of content each month. That’s an awful lot of people talking to other people about their everyday lives and experiences, both the good and the bad. So whether you like it or not, your customers are talking about your brand right now. Not in six months or two years, but now! Consumer behaviour and, more specifically, their buying behaviour is already deeply entwined in social media channels.

All about the customer: Cliff Mills, NCC Research (August 2011)

Customer relationship management (CRM) needs to represent a business strategy that ultimately commits a business to being driven by the customer and becoming a fully customer-centric organisation. Hence CRM technology becomes an enabler to deliver profitable value to customers through the understanding and anticipation of their needs. Success therefore depends, not on the software implementation, but on developing an holistic or overarching customer strategy irrespective of any technology used – if a company is not customer orientated then all the technology in the world will not change this. A company needs to provide the context, support, training and correct business environment for employees to take full advantage of the information systems provided. From this year’s Evaluation Centre survey, only 35% of organisations perceive that they have formulated this overarching customer strategy, while 37% claim to be in the process of developing one. This leaves 23% who have not started on the process yet.

Critical success factors for CRM: D Jefferson, JI Management Consultants(Aug 11)

CRM success can transform your bottom line, but after 20 years in customer interface consultancy and other roles, it is clear that some success factors are much more ‘critical’ than others. Here are some insights that will help you to avoid repeating the mistakes of history: your solution. With every CRM project there is a unique product/customer and sales proposition to define the context for CRM. It is never the same twice, so don’t get diverted by the proposition that someone else’s solution will be right for you. Avoid shopping for a ‘best buy’ CRM technology product. Think of selection in terms of a ‘horses-for-courses’ model. If your processes require something specific, a ‘market leader’ choice can be a bad buy; where to start. Accept that you know nothing about the right CRM answer for your organisation. Enrol the most senior sponsor to be the CRM corporate success owner at board level. The CRM journey is about putting your customer at the centre of your thinking.

Social CRM: all talk, no action: Conrad Funnell, PA Consulting Group (July 2011)

The increasing development of social media has now reached the realm of customer services in a way that is changing the art of the customer conversation. Whether planned or not, businesses have been thrust into the social media limelight, yet many still leave their reputation to chance and fail to make the most out of this latest channel into the contact centre. Social media allows a business to act as a broadcaster capable of disseminating information to thousands of people within seconds. However, business is not the only new broadcaster on the block. Whilst customer service has continually changed over the years, there was a time when executives could dictate how they wanted to handle customer interaction. Now the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have opened up a new shop door that will be open 24 hours a day and accessible to all.

CRM under the spotlight: Simon Lindley, Sourcing Advisory (June 2011)

Is outsourcing, with its promise of access to specialist support, cheaper delivery and committed service levels, the catalyst needed for CRM to deliver on its expectations? Or is it a recipe for abdication of responsibilities and the loss of strategic focus on a critical business activity? Clearly, with a difficult economic environment, the challenges of customer interaction across multiple social media channels and a competitive technology landscape boosted by the speed and ease of Software as a Service delivery options, CRM has rightly become an increasing focus for many businesses. Reflecting this, a Gartner survey earlier this year found that spending on CRM software is expected to see the largest increase of all the application software markets worldwide in 2011.

Being socially aware: Sean Mahdi & Gorham Palmer, PwC (May 2011)

When Facebook announced last summer that it had registered half a billion users around the globe, it resulted in a flurry of publicity and commentary (and they’re now over 600 million!). The media excitement grew exponentially this January when Goldman Sachs invested $450 million in the social networking site – and valued it at a jaw-dropping $50 billion. It is clear that social networking has become one of the dominant cultural phenomena in these digital times. The pace of this rise to prominence in everyday life for so many people, as well as its global impact, is remarkable. What had appeared to be simply another Western teenage fad was, in fact, being embraced by many different societies and groups of people around the world. So was this 500 million-user milestone and $50 billion valuation the warning shot for organisations that had previously considered social media an irrelevance? Is it now time for all businesses to start thinking about its potential impact?

CRM of the future: James Herbert, Steria (April 2011)

The CRM marketplace is changing rapidly, driven by the rise of online selling and social networking, the new technology expectations of those now joining the workforce, and technology trends like the growing use of smartphones and other consumer devices within corporations. These changes are impacting sales and marketing professionals in both the private and public sectors, in different ways. Here are some of the latest trends in these sectors: accelerated changes in marketing. Marketing has changed fundamentally, driven by a new, digitally active generation – and this change is accelerating as fast as ever. Today’s zippers and zappers opt to watch what they want on TV, zipping through the advert breaks and zapping the channel when the adverts are on.

Call for consolidation: Cathie Metcalfe, Gradient Consulting (March 2011)

Two key priorities for IT managers now are ‘maintaining service levels with reduced budgets’ and ‘aligning IT with the business strategy’. One way to solve both problems is by consolidating systems – a system consolidation project should increase service levels to customers and internal users alike, whilst adding value by supporting the business strategy. But why consolidate? One key driver is that when systems aren’t aligned to the business strategy, they can hold back the growth of an organisation. For example, it might be that new markets are opening up overseas, but your existing ERP system cannot meet multi-currency and multi-language requirements. Or perhaps you aren’t able to respond to competition quickly enough because your website is separate from your core ERP system. Again, your system may not be functionally rich in the areas you need – 10 years ago you were all about manufacturing, but now you add value through design and engineering and your needs lie with a PLM system. Or perhaps you are slow to understand how your customers are changing because your CRM system is disjointed from other systems.

Cultivating culture of CRM: Derek Bishop, Culture Consultancy (March 2011)

Customer relationship management systems can be found in all shapes and sizes, their central purpose being to help you gather data which leads to a better understanding of your customers. Of course, only by understanding your customer will you be able to offer them the experience they desire; assist them in buying the products they need or want; improve internal efficiency; and identify new customer and product opportunities. In effect, only by understanding your customers will you create organisational success. However, the value of the intelligence that you get from CRM systems is only as good as the quality of the data that’s collected – and therein lies the challenge. In order to capture up-todate, meaningful and valuable information on your customers, share it across all your internal teams and create a joined-up holistic service to your customer, you need to create full alignment within your internal company culture.

Getting inside your client's head: L Agness, The Change Corporation (Feb 2011)

Successful selling is all about building world-class customer service and long-term relationships. But it is very costly in both time and money to bring in new business – far better if clients ‘pull’ your organisation’s services from you, as opposed to you spending your work hours going out and ‘pushing’ them. One way to achieve that is using NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) techniques – such as sensory acuity and rapport – which aim to ensure your communications style matches the client’s. One question I get asked more than any other is whether or not NLP is manipulative. I often challenge the question by pointing out that practically all salespeople have been taught ‘manipulative’ techniques! So NLP is not the only toolkit that has the potential to manipulate – there are many salespeople out there with huge sales targets who are taught to sell at all costs, whether the customer needs the goods or not.

Getting it right with key accounts: Richard Ilsley, Synogis (January 2011)

Doing business with and actually making money from your largest strategic customers has never been more difficult. Only a few corporations are getting it right. So what is a ‘key account’ and why should we care? For most managers, a key account is just a big customer with a dedicated salesperson who gets a new title and a training seminar. Key accounts are just those big customers who you happen to be selling to right now. For the more enlightened, key accounts are those customers who have a strategic role to play in your growth. So you might have key accounts to whom you sell nothing right now or key accounts that are small or in new markets, as well as the big ones whose loss would have a huge short-term impact. What are the implications of this?

Assuring CRM sucess: Nick Sanderson, Pelicam (December 2010)

We’ve all seen the reports and headlines about the disappointingly high proportion of IT projects that fail. You may be less familiar with the bottom-line cost these failed initiatives represent to the organisations that commissioned them, often with high hopes of them making positive contributions to their businesses. One estimate from December 2009 (www.objectwatch.com/whitepapers/itcomplexitywhitepaper.pdf) puts it at a truly staggering $6.2 trillion – which is six times the GDP of the UK. One area of consistent disappointment here is customer relationship management – the attempt to streamline and improve through technology the way you communicate and work with your allimportant customers. In fact, objective research estimates that around half of CRM projects fail: analyst numbers range from finding that 56% (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2007) to 47% (Forrester Research, 2009) of all CRM activity is wasted effort and budget.

Keeping the customer satisfied: Steve Downton, Noventum Downton (October 2010)

Existing customers are the most important asset of a business, and retaining and extending your share of their ‘wallet’ is one of the most valuable actions a business can take. To support this, CRM is moving away from the traditional – but now outdated – capture and utilisation of information about a customer, towards understanding the customer experience and guiding and directing the customer towards a trusting relationship, to the benefit of both parties. Back in the mid-90s when the phrase CRM was first coined, service was still very much an after-thought focused on the efficiency of ‘break-fix’. So the original CRM products were sold to sales teams as a support tool to increase their effectiveness in managing targeted accounts. Now, though, customer relationship management is very much a service-focused business solution aimed at helping businesses to gain real insight into their customers, and to disseminate information from wherever it is gathered to wherever it is needed.

CRM's chequered future: Cliff Mills, NCC Research (August 2010)

It’s no secret that winning and retaining customers is the key to business growth and success. Easy to say, but not so easy to achieve, particularly in today’s tough economic environment where products and services are being bought and sold through multiple, different channels. Companies are also experiencing increasing customer demands, as well as the difficulty of introducing and enforcing processes to effectively support their prospects, customers and partners. Technology can help – but the use of IT to support sales, marketing and customer service teams has had a chequered history…what has generally become known as customer relationship management (CRM) has taken a long time to be fully accepted. In the early days, the best way to use the technology was little understood and typically it only addressed one issue or business process. In many cases, its proponents failed to get senior management support or to fully educate the organisation about the changes necessary to achieve success.

Killer mishaps: Richard Boardman, Mareeba CRM Consulting (July 2010)

I recently put together an e-guide on how to buy and implement CRM software. In the process, it was apparent that there are popular misconceptions about many aspects of purchasing and implementing CRM technology – and perhaps for that matter many other types of technology. The sooner we dispel these myths, the sooner we can better harvest CRM’s potential – so here are the key areas of misunderstanding: Misconception 1. CRM is all about choosing the right software. While technology selection is important, it’s not as important as people think. We’re blessed to live in an age where there are a host of flexible, highly functional, low-cost CRM technologies available for purchase. Yes, you need to exercise caution, but there’s considerably less scope to get things wrong than there was five years ago.

Supplying demand: Mark Whitehouse, SolutionChannels (June 2010)

When you are looking to get your message out there these days – in order to generate demand for your products or services – you have to be more creative and innovative than ever before. Most organisations indulge in e-shots on a regular basis and email is still the primary demand generation ‘tool’. This is rather worrying when you consider that the average response rates to email blasts are typically only 2-4%. Hardly a great return for a high investment of time and resource! Put another way, with such low response and click-through rates, does this mean that 96% or more of your target audience are simply not interested in your message? Or does it raise the question of what needs to change to increase these poor response rates? To make matters worse, the volume of email we all receive is increasing (on average by 16% a year) and this means it’s even harder to make your email stand out from the crowd – so that your target audience will actually open it in the first place, let alone take any action.

From inside-out to outside-in: Laurence Buchanan, Capgemini (April 2010)

It was Thomas Jefferson who said “every generation needs a revolution”. We are fortunate to be living in a time of enormous technological and social change. Ten years ago most of us would have: watched advertisements on TV; asked friends about products or read reviews in magazines; bought goods and services on the high street; bought goods and services through intermediaries; paid the asking price; fixed problems by re-reading the manual; and queued and complained to call centres. The speed of change in the last decade has been breathtaking. Broadband internet has rampaged through our business and social lives, transforming industries from top to bottom. One of the most striking changes has been the total shift in power to the customer. Information is no longer a scarce resource, price is no longer a differentiator, bad service or poor value for money is now brutally exposed and multiplied through our social networks for all to see. We are living through a customer revolution.

Trick of tweet: Billie Andersen & Jonathan Culling, Foviance (March 2010)

Even if you’re not a Facebook addict or regular Twitter user, you’ll know how difficult it is becoming to escape social media. Why? Because social media is revolutionising the way that people consume content. Sales and marketing professionals need to be aware of these significant consumption trends so they can tailor and target their messages as effectively as possible across a changing landscape. Until recently, most advertising was broadcast to consumers through one-way media such as TV, radio or the printed press. If you were good at your job (or lucky), your advertisement made an impact on the target audience and sparked ‘water cooler’ conversations up and down the country. With the rise of social media, many of those conversations are now happening online. A recent study by Penn State University showed that 20% of all tweets (Twitter messages) mentioned a brand name.

Experience for a lifetime: Conrad Funnell, PA Consulting (February 2010)

Organisations are trying to determine what they should do to lift them out of the economic downturn. But given that companies worldwide have cut resources and budgets over the last year and the purse strings will be tight for some time to come, how should businesses make best use of these limited resources? In PA’s view, customer retention delivers greater shareholder value than seeking new customers. The primary challenge, therefore, is to make the most out of your existing customer base, rather than attract new customers. In fact, even without the backdrop of current market conditions, retention makes business sense – customer acquisition has been benchmarked as being four to 10 times more expensive than retaining one existing customer.

Lack of insight: Jennifer Kirkby, Mutual Marketing (January 2010)

“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth life’s experience,” said American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes. And indeed, when we think of insight, we see it as rare and valuable, discerning and perceptive – a knowledge that transcends the superficial and gets to the heart of something, to find its true nature. In the world of customer management, insights can be like diamonds – “flashes of inspiration that can lead to specific opportunities” to quote Merlin Stone, Alison Bond and Bryan Foss’s Consumer Insight; or, more usually, a deep understanding of the customer in the context of the market. Insight is the ability to get inside the customer’s head in a way that is valuable to that particular business. For example, the insight that customers think blue washing powder gives a cleaner wash than white, even though the chemicals are the same, is not that useful to a telecoms company, but obviously key to a detergent manufacturer.

Blind to the faults?: L Mitchell/M Richards, Objective Designers/expw (Nov 2009)

Most people can relate to examples of when customer service organisations have driven you completely bonkers: being passed off to another department that does not answer your call and drops you into a black hole; getting through to an overseas call centre that has not a clue how to address your problem; orders placed and fulfilled incorrectly…the list is endless. But given that the customer relationship is such a fundamental component of the success of any business, why do companies behave in such a maddening way? We believe the answer may lie in some interesting new research which describes a model that can help us both diagnose the roots of certain common mental health problems – as well as understand some of the wider dysfunctions within organisations. Recent psychological research in the UK has come up with a new model for us to understand better what is going on with people suffering from a range of mental health conditions, such as Asbergers’ syndrome, autism and schizophrenia.

Return on ideas: Professor Robert Shaw, Demand Chain Partners (July 2009)

Marketing is at a crossroads in its history. It is seen as disposable, nice-to-have and discretionary, with worrying consequences: marketing is not attracting enough commercially astute people; MBAs/graduates see marketing as ‘fluffy’ and ‘third choice’; marketing is declining in its numeracy and commercial skills; marketing backs down in arguments about its added value and loses its budgets; marketing has a ‘BadAss’ image with colleagues and the public that is a problem in modern times; and marketing is very wasteful compared with most other departments in business today. In an ad-hoc test, I Googled job adverts on the internet to see who was looking for ‘commercially astute’ executives. In the case of sales execs, 2,090 adverts were seeking commercially astute people; in the case of finance jobs, the total was 1,460. For marketing – a mere 23. Evidently marketers don’t seem to want to attract commercial talent – just artistic!

Pressing the hot buttons: Trevor Alderson, Ipsos Mori (June 2009)

The global economic downturn has dramatically increased the need to understand and manage customers. At the same time, customers have more and more choice and are seeking value in everything they buy, helped by the growth in price comparison websites and multi-channel shopping. These combined issues have led to an increasing focus on customer retention. In fact, recent research by Ipsos MORI shows that 57% of industry leaders intend to focus on the retention of customers whereas only 23% will be concentrating on acquisition strategies. With this in mind, businesses need to work very hard to make sure they understand their customers and that their communications are as effective as possible. As businesses across the board switch their focus to retention strategies, they need to pinpoint exactly what their customers’ hot buttons are. Otherwise they risk being sucked into a downward spiral of price discounting and promotional deals, to appeal to customers solely on price with consequent adverse impacts on margin and profitability.

Technology is not enough: David Freedman, Huthwaite International (May 2009)

Selling has become much tougher. Across many industries, products are becoming more commoditised – a development that has been accelerated by customers’ greater knowledge about the options available to them as a result of new channels of information such as the internet. And, of course, the ability of the buyer to use commoditisation as a bargaining tool to drive down price is increased at a time of general economic downturn. The result is that suppliers must focus on other aspects of service support and delivery in order to achieve the necessary level of differentiation to ‘stand out from the crowd’. In order to put forward an all-round proposition which best meets the individual customer’s requirements, it is essential to understand – and, better still, agree – precisely what that customer’s challenges and needs are.

Beating the recession with information: Derek Bishop, Abeo Consulting (April 09)

Back in 2007, industry analyst Gartner reported that nine out of 10 organisations would fail within their first year unless they approached information management in a co-ordinated, enterprise manner. “In order to survive, organisations must exploit their information assets and address issues surrounding data overload to achieve their efficiency, transparency and differentiation objectives,” the analyst firm said. Fast forward to 2009 and the situation is no better. In fact, given the current economic climate, the need to use management information to its full potential has never been more critical to business survival. And this time, it won’t only be infant businesses that fail due to poor management information, but long-standing, global organisations too. Just think about some of the household names that have fallen victim to the recession in recent months. For example, I believe that one of the main causes of Woolworths’ demise was its level of customer service and poor positioning in the marketplace alongside newer concepts such as Wilkinsons.

Towards SRM: Tim Haigh, Cirquent (March 2009)

Relatively few companies have incorporated customer relationship management technologies effectively, even though the concept has been around for a long time now. Many early adopters failed to implement often highly complex and costly systems successfully, with poor-quality data. The result? Little user take-up. In some instances, the problems related to the chosen technology. Frequently, however, the shortfall of delivery against expectation can be traced to a lack of training, resulting in a fundamental lack of understanding among end users as to how to get the best from the CRM system. Likewise, companies have failed to address cultural issues around transparency of process, which demands a very different way of working. Yet there are also many best-practice examples of how CRM, properly implemented, can deliver powerful benefits in both customer service and internal efficiencies. And this has recently moved a significant step further, as organisations have begun to recognise that these benefits can be extended to other third-party relationships, including suppliers, partners and intermediaries.

Why killer products don't sell: Ian Gotts & Dominic Rowsell (February 2009)

Whether or not your corporation has a strong track record of sales success, there is no guarantee that your experience can help you to take a ground-breaking product to a new market. Yet there is nothing more soul destroying for an evangelist, an investor or, most of all, for a founder than a truly innovative product which never fulfils its revenue promise. A little bit of you dies as every week the sales quotas are not met until the product is relegated to the skip. And success is measured in £££, so selling is job number 1, 2 and 3. 'Crossing the Chasm' by Geoffrey Moore clearly showed that there are different buyers with very different buying habits. But despite these insights, relatively little has been written to help companies understand how to transform their innovative ideas into products or services that customers want to buy and are able to buy.

Keeping your contact centre happy: David Bennett, Siemens (January 2009)

Customers are demanding faster and more efficient responses from customer service, and with technological developments, these demands are coming through multiple contact channels. The knock-on-effect is that contact centre agents are experiencing increased work demands and expectations. The key question is whether the IT system supporting them is delivering results without impacting on the speed of call resolution or ease of use? A recent poll by Siemens Enterprise Communications addressed these issues by examining the service delivery challenges faced by contact centre professionals and their impact on customer satisfaction. The report, which is based on responses from over 500 contact centre workers in the UK, highlights two key challenges faced by contact centre agents – the technology threat to performance, and agent attrition. The research also offers insight into contact centre best practice, and how businesses can use new technologies to deliver a more effective service to customers.

Passives or promoters?: Andrew Broome, Axactia (November/December 2008)

More and more companies are focusing on ‘customer advocacy’ as a driver of sustainable profitability. Customer advocacy measures your focus on predicting future customer behaviour – in contrast to traditional customer satisfaction measures which focus on service delivered in the past. It is this ability to understand your customers’ future intentions that provides insights into what actions you need to take to enable sustainable profit growth. One measure of customer advocacy that is growing in popularity is the ‘net promoter score’ or NPS (see www.netpromoter.com). NPS is based on identifying which customers are: ‘promoters’ – those people who are so enthusiastic about your company that they increase their own purchases and recommend you to their friends or colleagues; ‘detractors’ – those who feel so badly treated that they cut back on purchases, switch to the competition, and warn others to stay away from the company; or ‘passives’ – those who are neither promoters nor detractors. A company’s NPS is the percentage of customers who are promoters minus the percentage that are detractors.

Bridging the gap: Mary Ann Tillman, Convergys (October 2008)

When it comes to quality of service, customers have growing expectations. Consumers everywhere are more in control now and require anytime, anywhere, any channel service. Customers and call centre agents alike are frustrated – and have been for quite some time. Each side wants enquiries resolved on the first call. In a recent Convergys study of 1,000 customer service consumers in the UK and North America, the two most important attributes of service were found to be knowledgeable agents and getting customer needs addressed on the first contact – ranked by 65% and 64% of the survey respondents respectively. In the past, CRM systems – regarded as the ‘be-all and end-all’ for customer-centric businesses – might have been touted as the solution to this issue. But CRM has major shortcomings when it comes to retrieving vital information that customer service agents need in order to resolve an issue on the first call.

What Web 2.0 means to you: Jeffrey Peel, Quadriga Consulting (September 2008)

Web 2.0 is vastly over-hyped. To some extent this is because the person/organisation who coined the term, Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, has built a huge business around the concept. Seminars, conferences and websites extol the virtues of Web 2.0 and all the IT players want to jump onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon. This kind of thing happens again and again in the world of information technology. However, in the case of Web 2.0, a whole new bubble has developed around the concept – to some extent egged on and hyped by the O’Reilly empire. But the consequence is that, once again, we’re seeing big acquisitions of Web 2.0 players. However, this bubble is a bit different. O’Reilly correctly stumbled upon a new web phenomenon that is truly fascinating and revolutionary at the same time – especially for marketers.

'Our customers are tarts': David Butler, TripleIC (August 2008)

Here’s an interesting proposition. Customer churn – the rate at which companies lose customers – is increasing. In 2005 it was 19%, in 2008 it’s 22% and in 2010 it’s likely to reach 25%. At this rate, businesses are losing between a quarter and a half of their potential revenue. Increasingly, boards of directors have remuneration-committee targets influenced by churn. Bosses are forfeiting their bonuses through churn. What’s more they don’t know how to improve that situation. They’re looking for someone who does. Twenty years ago customer satisfaction was the key. Do the customers like what we offer? Nowadays satisfaction means nothing. A recent study in the US showed that among customers who claim to be ‘delighted’ with a given supplier, three-quarters nevertheless will shop around before the next time they buy. As one retail CEO told me: “Our customers are tarts, they go with anyone if the price is right, and they’re stealing my bonus.”

Have you met Jim Roy?: Peter Urey, TripleIC (May 2008)

The 27th bottle of champagne has just been cracked open as the sun sets on another Monaco F1 Grand Prix. You, your industry partners and their bejewelled companions relax on the deck of your enormously expensive rented gin palace. The drink flows, inhibitions collapse and so the winners of this sumptuous partner loyalty incentive begin to berate you for having wasted your company’s money on yet another inappropriate jaunt whilst they struggle to keep their businesses – and yours – afloat. What’s worse, you realise that you have inadvertently invited a couple of bitter rivals to the same function and their acrimony further sours the table talk. This behaviour is at complete odds with the roseate vision painted by the coalition of your channel marketers and the loyalty industry, who between them persuaded you to grit your teeth and sign off the incentive scheme. According to them, all your competitors offer similar or even more attractive packages. “Last month your main competitor flew everyone to Las Vegas!” If your company fails to match these incentive offerings, all your business partners will dump you in favour of those who do. There is no alternative.

Solution or part of the problem?: David Jacobs, Profit from Information (Apr 08)

A new system is often seen by the modern business as a solution to its problems. But without a careful questioning approach, the introduction of such a system can easily become more of a problem than a solution. Worse, in the customer-facing systems arena, not ‘getting it right’ can be more damaging than in other areas of the business – resulting in loss of sales or even complete business meltdown. As a start point, most people accept that projects to implement customer-facing systems usually fail when run as a technical exercise. This is so well-known that we should be way beyond such misapprehensions by now. The problem is, we don’t get much detail on how to run projects as a truly business-led exercise in order to end up with the perfectly aligned IS/IT and business functions the pundits talk so much about. We know we need to focus on business objectives but after that the signal goes weak. One way forward is to ask the following key questions when you are faced with a possible systems project in the customer area.

Contact centres of the future: Michael Anderson, Capgemini (March 2008)

Organisations tend to overestimate the satisfaction of their customers: many companies see their contact centres as successful – but customers tell a different story. For example, the Genesys Global Consumer Survey 2007 found that 63% of customers are regularly frustrated by long hold times, 50% by interactive voice response (IVR) systems with too many or incorrect options, and 47% by having to repeat information already provided. This dissatisfaction sours the relationship between customer and business. And customer discontent, coupled with high costs, means that unless contact centres undergo a radical transformation, customers will vote with their feet. At best, the organisation will feature negatively in the press, and in customer forums and blogs. One key problem is that customers expect a lot from contact centres. Increasingly, they benchmark their online experiences against the sophistication of Web 2.0 technologies and so come to expect the same choice of communication methods that they enjoy in their leisure time.

Putting customers on the map: Louella Fernandes, Quocirca (February 2008)

The global digital age has had a profound impact on consumer access to maps, which are becoming an intrinsic part of everyday life. We are all familiar with web-based mapping applications such as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Microsoft Windows Live Local, as well as the Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth platforms. Along with GPS devices for leisure applications, in-car navigation and the emergence of mobile phones and handheld devices that offer GPS services, we are being exposed to a wealth of location-based information. The influx of these web-based mapping services and pervasive GPS data is bringing geography to the masses and also stimulating the corporate appetite for exploiting location technology.

Putting customers in the frame: M Collins, Database Marketing Counsel (Jan 2008)

Since the introduction of the term ‘customer relationship management’ businesses have wrestled with a number of issues: is it purely a technology or is it a business strategy? Is it a process that can be imposed on a business or does it demand a change of culture? Is it contact management or is it salesforce automation? Does it belong in the IT department or is it a marketing function? Most exponents of CRM portray it as a strategy that has implications for, and which can benefit, all areas of the business. CRM relies on a culture that puts the customer at the heart of all processes, communications and policies and is normally supported by technology. But whilst these tenets sound very laudable and make for a worthy goal, many businesses are still running headlong into what they believe CRM to be without fully assessing the consequences, or even truly understanding the approach and whether they are fully prepared for it.

Customers: the keys to prosperity: Professor Tom Lambert, TripleIC (December 07)

‘Customer centricity’ is a simple concept, but it has proved difficult for many organisations to move beyond the concept to effective action. Customer centricity demands that you make the customer the driving force of the business. In essence it is matter of treating customers like people; finding out and anticipating what they want and expect, and being ready to change internal processes to redesign or excise those that fail to deliver real customer value, is one key aspect. Customer centricity is what a few, very few global brand leaders are good at. But it is something that we all need to become better at if we want to survive. It has become a constantly reiterated theme that ‘the customer is king’ – or some similar nonsense. Nonsense because until things go wrong, too many firms believe they know best and give no real opportunity for customers to talk about what is important to them.

Mature but mobile: Phil Branston, Bradgate (November 2007)

Customer relationship management software has been around for more than 20 years. And like many technologies, it has moved through stages of progressive product segmentation as the market has been colonised by more and more entrants. CRM has now split into sub-categories like salesforce automation, contact management and personal information management. The category is broadening too – into areas like customer interaction management, which addresses voice interactions as well as customer data. In the early stages, CRM might have meant more to software publishers and industry analysts than to customers, but today CRM data is integral to many businesses. Many more companies now use CRM packages to automate their real business processes – rather than the software imposing a process. Research suggests that half of all companies that are medium-sized and above have not only a recognised CRM business process, but a system for automating it, be that purchased software or inhouse-developed IT.

Improving contact centre agility: Sheryl Kingstone, Yankee Group (October 2007)

All organisations need to provide superior customer service across all interaction channels. When a customer contacts the company, it has to manage that interaction quickly and accurately across any touchpoint. A poor service experience will have a negative ripple effect on customer satisfaction. Over time, it could potentially: increase costs by forcing interactions with different employees over multiple channels – customers will create separate service requests through the phone, web, email or chat; cut revenue by losing valuable cross-selling or up-selling opportunities; and force the customer to look at competitive offerings. The contact centre, a single port of call for all sales and service needs, gives the customer or customer service representative (CSR) access to new services and customer care functionality, while acting as an individualised marketing channel that organisations can use to push new products and services. However, many CRM applications do little to meet the main goals and objectives of contact centres – in fact, CRM application packages become yet another unused silo of information for many companies.

Building CRM 2.0: Saj Usman & Saideep Raj, Accenture (September 2007)

Not long ago, choosing customer relationship management (CRM) software was relatively simple, with one company, Siebel Systems, dominating the market. Even when competing vendors appeared, organisations were able to select their software by simply comparing product features against their checklist requirements. Nowadays, most organisations that try to follow the classic checklist approach soon find that a decision-making model suited to yesterday’s landscape is insufficient for today’s far more complex marketplace. Today, CRM software means not only best of breed solutions, but also enterprise platform vendors, numerous niche players and an emerging array of software as a service (SaaS) offerings. With so much variety – not to mention volatility –making good software choices is a lot harder. Organisations need a new model for evaluating the CRM software options now available and choosing the model or models best suited to their business and technology requirements.

Channelling your efforts: Dan Eddy, EMCG (July/August 2007)

Historians from the future who focus on this time will doubtless pay particular attention to the extraordinary range of communications technologies deployed today. The global internet, instantaneous voice and data communications and the myriad private international computer networks run by corporations, have combined to create a world where people are interacting in real and virtual space on a grand and complex scale. The global communications revolution has implications for people and organisations in every part of the world – not least because it is making it so much easier and cheaper to interact. For anyone thinking of setting up a new business, doing so without taking into account the commercial opportunities offered by new communications technology is almost unthinkable. Indeed, more and more new businesses today are essentially offshoots of the global communications revolution.

The key to customer-centricity: Stephen Hewett, Charteris (May 2007)

Research suggests that in most organisations, something like 50-70% of internal effort expended doesn’t, in fact, add any value to what the organisation achieves for its customers. These findings are alarming – though when you consider what people say about the calibre of customer service they receive from many organisations, perhaps they are not especially surprising. To address the problem, companies clearly need to take every feasible step to implement the business strategy of customer-centricity within the organisation. A useful definition of customer-centricity is: the process of ensuring that every individual and department within an organisation takes every step feasible to add value to what the organisation does for its customers.

Are you a back-seat driver?: Andrew Broome, Axactia (April 2007)

Would you drive your car from the back seat? Hopefully not. So why are many businesses driving from the equivalent of the back seat – the back office? In my experience, this is not a deliberate choice. It’s something that comes about over a period of time as changes are made to business processes, organisational structure and technology. But it’s not uncommon to find that the root cause of a back-seat driving mentality lies in the deployment of technology within a back-office function. An IT architecture designed from the back office creates a backward-looking, or internally focused, culture within a business. Decision making becomes preoccupied with supply-side considerations – the impact of change internally, how to be more efficient and constraint-driven thinking. The customer ends up down the list of priorities.

Future of CRM: Diego Anderiz, Atos Origin (March 2007)

Service oriented architecture (or SOA as it is commonly referred to) is a bigger phenomenon than CRM: it provides a foundation for the entire enterprise IT architecture. Once only a buzzword in the IT industry, early adopters are now re-engineering their entire IT architecture around SOA principles. This is a pattern that is likely to become more common through this year and beyond, and will be a key driver in the replacement of CRM implementations and re-engineering existing business processes. IT product vendors would have us think that service oriented architectures are the key to a rationalised infrastructure; and they are positioning products as being SOA-compliant. However, SOA is a concept that has been around for years, and has only recently gained more momentum.

CRM: the comeback kid: Diego Anderiz, Atos Origin (February 2007)

CRM continues to be a topic that generates much debate. What exactly is it? How has it evolved? What are the current trends? And ultimately where is it going? Behind the questions, one certainty is unavoidable: CRM continues to be a hot topic, and it is currently experiencing a rebirth. By revisiting the reasons behind the early CRM market growth, exploring recent market trends and analysing ways to measure the success of CRM initiatives, we can explain the underlying reasons for the current phenomenon. According to a Gartner Group definition proposed several years ago, CRM can be segmented into two components: CRM is a business strategy that commits the organisation to being driven by the customer (also referred to as becoming ‘customer-centric’); and CRM technology is used as an enabler to deliver profitable value to customers through the understanding and anticipation of their needs.

Selling your system: Richard Boardman, Mareeba CRM Consulting (January 2007)

A recent review by Conspectus Magazine (www.conspectus.com) revealed that only 14% of organisations felt their CRM applications had been very successful, 39% had experienced some benefits, and 25% saw no benefits. So why the relatively lacklustre returns? There is nothing inherently wrong with the technology. CRM applications have been around since the late 80s and there are plenty of stable, functionally rich, well-supported applications to choose from. For many, the heart of the issue is the struggle for user adoption. You can have the greatest CRM system in the world but if you can’t get people to use it in a consistent and structured way, then it will generate no value. And nowhere does usage seem to be more of an issue than in the sales area. I’ve long lost track of the number of conversations I’ve had with anguished executives bemoaning their non-performing CRM systems because ‘sales just won’t use’.

Where future value lies: Nick Hewson, Hewson Group (December 2006)

CRM has had a short but quite dramatic history. It has, variously, been over-hyped and oversold – it has been seen as a Holy Grail and has been criticised for failing to deliver much in the way of a return on investment. Worst of all, it has been widely perceived as a technology, when more properly it should have been seen as a philosophy or business strategy that was technology-enabled. As a result, many CRM solutions – perhaps the majority – have been poorly acquired and badly implemented. Yet almost no major corporation in the Western economies operates today without a fairly substantial CRM infrastructure. How else would contact centres, service management, marketing campaigns, internet trading, business intelligence or sales management happen? CRM technologies are now integral to business life.

The contact centre's broken dreams: Paul Scott, Dimension Data (November 2006)

Thanks to the proliferation of alternative customer communication channels – fax, email, the internet, interactive voice response (IVR) and SMS/text messaging – many organisations have found that a huge proportion of their voice-only ‘call centres’ have turned into multi-channel ‘contact centres’. The advent of the contact centre came with its own utopian dream, whereby fully integrated customer communication channels would revolutionise the way businesses responded to customers.

Completing the picture: Professor Robert Shaw, Cass Business School (October 06)

Twenty years have passed since the world’s first marketing, sales and service systems were designed and implemented. But it was clear from the outset that to enjoy the benefits, it would be necessary to solve a jigsaw puzzle, as CRM had many interlocking pieces. Recently, those involved in CRM have written numerous press articles about their problems and frustrations, and the guru Seth Godin has even posted a pessimistic blog entitled “CRM is dead”. Over the 20 years, I have provided advice and analysis to scores of organisations, surveyed the development of new methods in over 100 organisations, and written books including the bestselling ‘Database Marketing’ – and I don’t agree that CRM is dead. But it is clear that one of the key pieces of the CRM puzzle – revenue analysis and profit optimisation – has been overlooked. In this article I describe the issue, explain why it’s important, identify 10 reasons for the problem and propose a solution for you to implement.

Watching the agents: Stephen Wright, Counterpoint (September 2006)

The mantra ‘you can only manage what you can measure’ is so well-established that you wonder why anyone has any complaints about contact centres – they are the most measured environments operating today. The average contact centre will be able to provide detailed performance information right down to the individual employee: how long they were on the phone; their average call length; how many calls they took in any given period. In reality, though, contact centres reveal the downside of this approach to management by only managing what can easily be measured. In other words, the telephony system provides contact centres with easily available data about call statistics and this is what is used to manage the employees. The result is that efficiency drives most management.

Avoiding the tyre kickers: Mark Walker, Merchants (August 2006)

Hands up if you decide which new car to buy because you are especially attracted to its tyres. I wouldn’t expect to see many fingers pointing to the sky – because when you buy a car, you buy what is valuable to you. For Mercedes owners, this could be prestige and the latest technology; for Alfa Romeo owners, this could be speed and Italian styling. Of course, tyres are critical to a car’s performance, it won’t move far without them, but they are not a core component or differentiator for each specific marque. This is the very reason why car manufacturers don’t make tyres themselves. Instead, they concentrate on their core competencies of car design, build and branding, and outsource tyre production to third parties whose core competence is making tyres.

Anything for an easy life: Mike Woodman, LogicaCMG (July 2006)

Most businesses servicing customers lose 10% or more of their revenue base each year. At this rate, within five years you would not be able to sustain your business. To stem the flow, you need to recognise that your business, your offering must change. And since the cost of acquisition is so high, you need to understand the true cost of your customers across their entire lifecycle, to identify which customers, with what offerings, are profitable – and keep them. To profit, you need to grow long-term lifetime value; you must satisfy the needs of profitable customers from first awareness, through acquisition, to support and retention throughout the entire business relationship lifecycle. To do this, you need to make customer relationship an integral part of the offering – it’s the collateral built up during the course of that relationship that makes the difference.

Contact centres: your troublesome teenager: Paul Scott, DiData (June 2006)

Like a child emerging from innocent childhood to clumsy adolescence, contact centres are growing up, they are maturing, and their custodians and guardians – the IT community – are finding out just how tough this can be. Contact centres are continually demanding improved technology – switches, IP-enabled centres, integrated voice and email across multiple sites. So how should the IT community and the business in general respond? How is the role of contact centres changing and what is the appropriate level of technology investment? What value does the contact centre represent to the business and what is the typical level of technology used in UK contact centres?

Relationship building: Steve Downton, Downton Consulting (May 2006)

Integrating service and call centres is a way of lowering costs and improving service. Many companies have also recognised that the ultimate value of linking these two departments is to manage the way the customer interfaces with the business and create an effective relationship management strategy and system of delivery. The ability to recognise and manage customer interaction is of growing importance. Different customers have different levels of skill and different needs; and providing for these different needs means each customer will feel more comfortable and hopefully be more loyal. Websites such as Amazon and Argos are good examples – they offer a variety of ways to contact them or order product. Many service sites will now let the user choose from an array of options, from arranging for an engineer to visit, to speaking to a skilled engineer on the equivalent of a chat line (at premium rates), to finding out how to fix the item without an engineer’s visit.

Using channels to beat your competitors: Gino Morelli, IF International (Apr 06)

Organisations seeking to win competitive edge need to become masters of the channels they use to deliver their products and services. Yet while delivery channels are clearly fundamental, their importance is sometimes overlooked even by organisations that pride themselves on the quality of their business thinking. A company’s approach to its marketing channels is one of the few really powerful potential differentiators that are still readily available. After all, your competitors are, by definition, trading in the same marketplace and under the same conditions as you. Yet even if your competition have access to the same potential marketing channels as you, in practice how you wield your marketing channels, and the quality of your understanding of them, will be uniquely yours.

Passing the customer test: Andrew Broome, Round (March 2006)

Every company reckons their strategy is customer-centric – after all, what company would say they are not focused on customers? However, the evidence from customer experiences, that companies are not delivering a customer-centred strategy, is overwhelming. All executives are customers of other companies and they are quick to describe in detail the poor customer experiences they have suffered. Yet they look affronted when asked “Why is your company different?”. In our consultancy work around customer centricity, we have observed many techniques, both good and not-so-good.

CRM for all: Michael Collins, Database Marketing Counsel (February 2006)

Back in the last century, the story was told of the corporate chairmen who read about database marketing and ‘wanted some’ even though they were not sure what it was. The same is happening all over again with customer relationship management (CRM). As many people as you speak to will give you just as many definitions of what they think CRM is all about. CRM is not software, but a customer-focused business strategy designed to optimise profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction. The object is to consolidate all service interactions, loyalty initiatives, customer communications and transactions through all possible contact media, in order to build an understanding of the customer and deliver that insight to the customer touchpoints.

Customers: are you thinking what they're thinking?: R Brickle, Bsquared (Jan 06)

Say ‘customer relationship management’ (CRM) to most people and they automatically think software. Not one type of software interestingly but a range of applications – from contact management and sales automation systems through to sophisticated enterprise systems. This hasn’t changed much in the 10-plus years that CRM has been around. Granted that there is now a lot more definition about the various ranges in the CRM spectrum but it is still a very mixed marketplace. Seen potentially as the Next Big Thing and a way of driving customer loyalty and profitability, CRM has attracted considerable interest. Cynically I would suggest some of this interest has been cultivated by those organisations that stood to gain most from any implementation, usually at significant cost.

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