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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

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