Despite the hype about CRM, most companies are out of sync with their customers.
“Customers think they have a relationship with us, but they don’t,” said Michael Maoz, vice president and research director for Gartner Group, speaking at Gartner’s Spring CRM Summit in Chicago. “For all the time and effort, they have a relationship with a channel, a department, or a region.”
The reason is that firms lack synchronal information on customers. “There’s no blueprint,” Moaz said.
The problem is urgent because the number of channels is only going to grow. “Today, the Internet is a channel,” Maoz said. “Tomorrow, it will be six channels.”
Maoz added that companies had 100 years to absorb the catalog channel and 40 years to absorb tele-sales.
In contrast, they have had four years to learn e-mail, and will have one year for broadband access.
Who’s doing it right?
One successful company is Dow Chemical. Dow examined its top 1,000 global accounts “and began to rationalize its database, creating a single view of each account,” Maoz said.
In 12 months, Dow has more than recovered all the costs associated with the project, and is reinvesting the excess funds, according to Maoz. It has also reduced sales costs. “Dow now has a self-funding CRM program,” he said.
Another winner is QVC, the $2.8 billion electronic retailer. The company monitors customer demand and readiness for new channels.
“They have added not only a Web site, they’ve added an online server,” Moaz continued. “Want to chat? You can chat. Want to send an e-mail? They’ll answer you.”
The most beautiful thing about it is that QVC has “almost no advanced technology,” Maoz said. “This whole thing is held together with spit.”
What’s the most difficult challenge for QVC and other companies?
“Keeping the brand across all the channels. Another problem is making sure that information is delivered effectively via all the touchpoints.
“Customers become infuriated, especially in B-to-B, when the buyer knows more about the service than the sales executive.”
To document these ideas, Maoz cited the following Gartner Group predictions about the situation in 2005:
*Organizations that create an enterprise-wide understanding of the customer architecture will improve chances of project success by 70%.
*Organizations able to synchronize customer-facing interaction across channels will outperform competitors with siloed channels by 20%.
*Customers that use multiple channels for interactions will highly correlate with most-valuable customers.
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