Customer service is all about people interactions - not CRM
McKinsey Quarterly has an article on customer service(requires subscription) in which they quote some interesting stats from Forrester: “According to Forrester research, only 10 percent of business and IT executives surveyed strongly agreed that business results anticipated from implementing CRM were met or exceeded.”
Diagnosing the problem, they say: :What’s regularly missing, in our experience, is the spark between the customer and frontline staff members—the spark that helps transform wary or skeptical people into strong and committed brand followers.”
Bingo! There are too few companies that focus on making sure that all customer touch-points with customers are optimized to provide a consistent and delightful experience…
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February 2nd, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Francois
CRM follows in the footsteps of Business Process Reengineering (BPR), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) & Total Quality Management (TQM) that all have anecodotally high failure rates.
What all have in common is that they are complex organisation-wide initiatives that require matching organisation-wide changes to deliver their promised benefits.
As the US economist Stanley Milgrom showed in his definitive studies on the failure of TQM in the USA, management overwhelmingly failed to pull all the levers (systems, processes, organisation, people, measures, rewards, etc) in a way that generated the benefits available from TQM. Those same benefits that have been generated by Japanese & Korean companies and the occasional US company like GE. Sadly, what goes for TQM applies equally to ERP, BPR and CRM.
It is not CRM that is at fault, it is weak enterprise-wide management.
Graham Hill
Indepndent Management Consultant
February 2nd, 2006 at 6:41 pm
Graham,
Thanks for the feedback - and I mostly agree with you.
But in the case of CRM, companies should first and foremost focus on making sure that all customer touch-points are consistent with the way they want their brand to be “experienced.”
So whether I am in pre-buying mode, buying mode, or whether I am first opening up the product that I just bought, or looking at the documentation if required, or calling into the company’s support center to get help or get an item returned or fixed, or calling their billing department with a billing problem - all those experiences should be consistent. Consistent not just from a “customer knowledge” point of view, but consistent from “brand experience” point of view!
And in most, large and small, companies those experiences are widely different and not aligned with the pre-buying buyer perceptions - so in effect resulting in disappointed buyers.
Francois
January 28th, 2007 at 4:40 am
shame celebs
sexy female soldiers