Most Customer Relationship Management or CRM implementations are governed by an incomplete vision, one that is far too internally focused, and as a result, they are quietly failing to live up to their potential. To get the most out of the massive investment that most companies have made in time and money, it is time to pursue a grander vision for CRM in which everyone who touches the customer is provided with help. This approach requires expanding the capabilities and the rewards that are typically associated with CRM.
The vision for CRM at most companies is too small because of the success of Siebel and then Salesforce.com, which defined CRM as a way to track and manage the sales process, essentially as sales force automation (SFA). In this model, CRM is inflicted on the sales staff for the benefit of the managers of a company. CRM becomes a big to-do list that does little to help increase more sales. This sort of tracking is a great help in running a boiler room operation in which the sales staff is driven to keep up a high level of activity without much regard for quality of the actions taken.
With the addition of social business capabilities like Salesforce Chatter or integrations between CRM systems and Jive Software or Microsoft Yammer, the information about the sales process becomes distributed to a wider audience through a news feed. The awareness that comes from broadcasting updates about sales activity for specific opportunities can provide for help in closing sales, but the process remains essentially internally focused.
In a recent conversation with Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, who has a significant stake in the success of both CRM and customer-centric social business, I received the outline of a new vision for CRM, one that is far more focused on providing increased quality in the process of selling and of serving the customer. If your company writes a big check for CRM, but doesn’t do much with it besides track sales, this vision may hold the key to getting much more out of your investment.
Larry Augustin’s Grand Vision for Customer-centric CRM
Augustin thinks that limiting CRM to sales force automation represents small thinking that vastly undersells the opportunity to use CRM effectively. “It is time for CRM to stop being so inwardly focused,” said Augustin. “Instead of sales force automation, CRM should live up to its name and start helping every single person who interacts with customers do a better job of serving them.”
Completing this vision means expanding what CRM typically does in several ways.
- The amount of information collected about the customer must increase dramatically, according to Augustin. “Instead of just having an order history, we must seek to expand the customer record to include everything that we know about the customer,” said Augustin. “In essence, we must combine the type of customer profile that is typically used by marketers or customer service apps and include that in CRM.”
- Contextual information must be expanded so that an individual customer’s behavior can be compared to the norm. “It is vital that the largest possible set of information, including external sources when possible, be used to create a more inclusive profiles to quickly reveal to users what is unique about the customer,” said Augustin. “For example, when a company shows that they ‘know’ me on a personal level without being creepy, I tend to feel more valued, and typically respond to those personalized messages.”
- The reach CRM of must be dramatically expanded to new populations of users who interact with the customers. “It is ridiculous to limit CRM to sales. In my view, every clerk walking the floor of a store, every customer service rep, every repair technician, receptionists - essentially everyone that interacts with a customer should have a view of the customer provided by CRM. Through our research we believe that for every user of CRM, there are at least 25 customer-facing individuals not using CRM, but they should,” said Augustin. “It’s not just about upselling, but about how to make the customer happier.”
- Real-time data, big data, and data from the Internet of things will all play a role in expanding the customer profile. “Some signals from this broader set of information will be volatile and only useful for a short time,” said Augustin. “Others will become part of the permanent record.”
- While CRM in its current form is used quite frequently from mobile apps, the new apps that are created to support the larger vision must also be mobile. “The ability to rapidly and affordably create custom mobile apps for each audience of the broader vision of CRM will become a differentiator,” said Augustin.
Tactics for Bringing the Vision to Life
To my thinking, Augustin is right that CRM can be the natural home for collecting all sorts of information and functionality related to the customer. Business discovery vendors like QlikView have made a significant impact by putting a more complete context about the customer in front of sales staff. Marketing automation vendors like Marketo assemble a score that indicates the value of a lead from many different sources of information. Customer service systems often have the ability to view past interactions. Rob Tarkoff, President and CEO of Lithium, a company that creates software to power social customer experiences, has suggested that a social profile must become part of the canonical record of customer information. When you add information that could come from in-store systems or mobile phones it is easy to imagine an incredibly detailed view of the customer.
Tracking that view in an organized way that is friendly toward emerging privacy regulations will be a significant challenge of both data modeling and compliance. So will creating the machine intelligence that distills the information and makes recommendations and suggestions.
It will be interesting to see how much of the new functionality becomes part of CRM products and how much is provided by new products. For example, Qubit is aimed squarely at providing an enhanced collection of detailed customer behavior information to enable marketers to personalize the experience in real time to drive sales through web sites and mobile apps. Mortar Data is productizing recommendations based on big data to provide Netflix and Amazon style recommendations.
“CRM as we know it today was originally designed for B2B salesforce automation and relationship management. It grew into the customer support tool for services organizations like telephone and gas companies,” said Graham Cook, CEO of Qubit. “There is a huge opportunity to create a new type of B2C CRM based off the web channel where entire personalized experiences are driven around a deep understanding of the customer and their behavior, making CRM a truly measurable channel.”
While all of this sounds great, it is important not to get carried away. My view is that it may take years for a company to fully achieve most aspects of the vision that I’ve laid out here. But it will only take weeks or months to do the simple things that expand the way that CRM is used and to serve new groups of users. The journey toward a larger vision of CRM is clearly one worth starting as soon as possible.
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Dan Woods is CTO and editor of CITO Research, a publication that seeks to advance the craft of technology leadership. For more stories like this one visit www.CITOResearch.com.
