Have you ever noticed that the world just seems to be changing faster and faster all the time?
I'm a big fan of the British television show, "Doctor Who." The premise of the show is that a time lord travels throughout time and space -- from ancient times to tens of thousands of years into the future. "The Doctor" is a mysterious time traveler whose life is often lived "backwards" as he appears in places where people may know him, but he hasn't met them in "his" life yet. It must be very confusing.
Sometimes I can relate to the Doctor.
The way our world is moving so quickly it is hard to "keep up" with the technology and how it changes us. Technology changes the way we work, how we interact with our own families and how we shop.
The idea behind CRM (customer relationship management) is that vendors, to be successful, must know who their customers are and why they buy what they buy. In the "old days" a small town might have had one butcher, one baker and one candlestick maker. A customer was known by name and the vendor (say the candlestick maker) knew what kind and color of candle Mr. Jones bought or Mrs. Smith acquired. CRM was just a part of the small customer base and the small proprieter.
Today we live in a world of Wal-Mart and Best Buy, not to mention Amazon.com and Buy.com . We customers are anonymous, and if we are anonymous we may only shop one time and never return. To gain our loyalty these large retailers must understand "who we are" by our buying habits, our demographics and our past buying habits.
Have you ever noticed when you visit Amazon's website that (if you've shopped there before) the website recommends new purchases to you based on what you've bought before? Smart marketing, and a good application of CRM.
The days of shopping online via our PC alone has already changed and CRM must change along with it.
Gartner Group, a research company specializing in high technology, is predicting that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common way to access the Internet by 2013. This has both a huge impact on what vendors will require from CRM, as well as a huge opportunity to sell us more, while also making us happier by meeting our needs in "real time." Customer loyalty and customer retention benefits from CRM tied to smart phones is an enormous potential -- and the holy grail of CRM.
Smart phones use both push and pull technology. Pull technology is when a phone user goes online via the phone and searches for an address or driving directions. They have proactively "searched" (or pulled) data from the internet. Perhaps they are looking for a nearby drug store. Perhaps they are searching for a certain product (perhaps a Wii game for their child). As the person runs the search CRM is at work.
Now "push" technology comes into play. An add for a Wii game sale is sent to the phone via GameStop or Wal-Mart. The user checks local prices and sees how close each vendor is to them (pull technology. GameStop is say 1/2 a mile away and Wal-Mart is 3 miles away). A 15% off coupon is sent to the phone by GameStop (push technology).
And so it goes. The future is the past, and soon the mega-stores may know you as well as the local candlemaker ever did.
The potential value of combining CRM, smartphones, GPS and unified communications to empower the customer while ensuring even higher customer loyalty is staggering. The opportunity is there, if CRM is properly utilized. The winners will do it. The losers will be gone.
Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marketing. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Friday, August 14, 2009
The World is Upside Down
This blog spends a lot of pixels on the topic of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). How can companies manage their customers. How can we keep current customers loyal and retain them? How can we find new customers who will be profitable and love us and stay with us?
Simple answer?
You can't.
You don't really manage customers anymore -- if you ever did. Perhaps the idea was always unreasonable.
Customers are people. Newsflash.
People are unpredictable. People are not, by nature, loyal. If they were the divorce rate wouldn't be at 50%.
People only care about what they care about NOW. Today. If you are selling Christmas trees to Jews they won't care. They don't use them (well, some do but not many).
Customers buy what they WANT to buy and the key today is not in trying to manage your customers but in understanding who they are, what they want (or need) and making it easy for them to be in the right place at the right time with the right story. Story is key here -- because customers need to be able to find what they need when they need it.
And it needs to be simple. Simple for customers to understand what your widget is. Easy for them to understand why it matters to THEM (not you, they could care less about you) and then make it easy for them to get to the end result of what they want. Intuitive (like a iPod, like a GUI (graphical user interface) versus a c: prompt).
The customer is now in charge of the world. Realize it. Embrace it. So now more than ever is "know thy customer" and realize that while you need them, they don't need you. Unless you give them a reason to need you.
Simple answer?
You can't.
You don't really manage customers anymore -- if you ever did. Perhaps the idea was always unreasonable.
Customers are people. Newsflash.
People are unpredictable. People are not, by nature, loyal. If they were the divorce rate wouldn't be at 50%.
People only care about what they care about NOW. Today. If you are selling Christmas trees to Jews they won't care. They don't use them (well, some do but not many).
Customers buy what they WANT to buy and the key today is not in trying to manage your customers but in understanding who they are, what they want (or need) and making it easy for them to be in the right place at the right time with the right story. Story is key here -- because customers need to be able to find what they need when they need it.
And it needs to be simple. Simple for customers to understand what your widget is. Easy for them to understand why it matters to THEM (not you, they could care less about you) and then make it easy for them to get to the end result of what they want. Intuitive (like a iPod, like a GUI (graphical user interface) versus a c: prompt).
The customer is now in charge of the world. Realize it. Embrace it. So now more than ever is "know thy customer" and realize that while you need them, they don't need you. Unless you give them a reason to need you.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
CRM and Unified Communications
My last blog focused on how Unified Communications (UC) can empower the contact center by directing nontraditional call center calls to the center. Most people think of UC as a way of combining multiple contact points for one person to a single point of contact (thus John Smith's office phone, cell phone, email, IM, etc. can all be directed to "ring" on his cell phone). This is the common way UC is explained, and it can be very valuable -- but it can also result in TMI (too much information).
Everyone may be created equal, but we can't give all of our customers, peers, bosses, and the world at large equal access to us or we'd never get any work done. We need to prioritize who can contact us and how. Thus with UC we can identify specific people (our boss, our spouse, our key customer) to reach us at our #1 end point (maybe that cell phone) while other important people get directed to voice mail -- or as I pointed out in my last blog -- this is a perfect opportunity to now direct those folks to a contact center where an inside sales rep or pool admin can hopefully handle their needs in one call (OCR = one call resolution).
So there is a natural marriage between UC and CC (contact center).
Where does CRM come into play?
CRM (customer relationship management) has become such a muddied term. It has become far too generic. To some it does mean contact center software (and it can be that), to some it means the software or software as a service (SaaS) that outside sales reps use to keep track of their accounts, where they are in the sales cycle, etc. -- and that is a good definition. . .but CRM is much bigger than that.
CRM is really broken into two broad categories: "front office CRM" and "Back office CRM."
Front office CRM are the applications that actually touch the customer directly -- the voice on the phone in the contact center, an internet interface where they can place an order, customer service (again online or over the phone) or the live customer service rep (CSR). Any part where the customer is directly interfacing with your company is a form of "front office CRM."
And a logical touchpoint for UC and CRM to link.
The holy grail of the contact center for years has been OCR - one call resolution. Any problem that isn't resolved in one call, or any sale that can't be closed in one call ("we have an internet special where for the same price you are paying today you can add XYZ. . .") costs lots of money. Any customer service call that takes too long or requires "follow up" also begins to alienate your customers making them more inclined to leave you for another firm.
UC can dramatically improve the goal of OCR -- whether that "one call" is a phone call, an internet access or even your face to face outside sales rep.
It all has to do with the "hand off." Inside a contact center this can be done with intelligent routing (which is really what UC is in a larger scheme of things). We route the call to the most logical, not the first available, agent. With UC we are now moving beyond the barrier of the contact center and able to route the call to best person no matter what department they work in, or even WHERE THEY ARE physically.
Setting up skills routing takes time, but the rewards are immense both in customer satisfaction and in cost reduction.
All of this so far focuses on the connectivity between front office CRM and UC, but back office CRM can increase this cost reduction by quantum factors. Using a data warehouse (or perhaps data mart) to identify your most profitable customers you may choose to always route them to a specific department or person -- not blindly treating all customers the same but giving platinum treatment to platinum customers.
By contrast your lower value customers (in margins) can always be routed through an IVR (interactive voice response) unit and routed to newer agents. . . The dirty little reality in sales is that there are some customers that are not worth having because the amount of work they require (and work = expense to your company) may mean you actually lose money by having them as a customer. Back end CRM identifies who is profitable and thus worth retaining.
One to one marketing is a myth. We do not market to all of our prospects and customers in the same way and we shouldn't. Back end CRM's information on customer profitability can help determine who we route to whom in our dynamic, unified communications world.
This blog is speaking in generalities -- as if we had all the money and time in the world to link all of these disparate systems together. The good news is that many of these systems are already begining to be linked -- Cisco with Salesforce.com, Aspect with Microsoft, Avaya and SAP, Nortel offers integration to Microsoft Dynamics CRM and implemented Dynamics internally. The idea is to take advantage of the technologies you may already have in place such as a legacy Siebel implementation maybe using AT&T's Siebel Solutions offer) to improve relations with your customers and business partners through a streamlined "one call resolution" that goes far beyond the silos of "outside sales," "engineering," "customer service" across your business.
Everyone may be created equal, but we can't give all of our customers, peers, bosses, and the world at large equal access to us or we'd never get any work done. We need to prioritize who can contact us and how. Thus with UC we can identify specific people (our boss, our spouse, our key customer) to reach us at our #1 end point (maybe that cell phone) while other important people get directed to voice mail -- or as I pointed out in my last blog -- this is a perfect opportunity to now direct those folks to a contact center where an inside sales rep or pool admin can hopefully handle their needs in one call (OCR = one call resolution).
So there is a natural marriage between UC and CC (contact center).
Where does CRM come into play?
CRM (customer relationship management) has become such a muddied term. It has become far too generic. To some it does mean contact center software (and it can be that), to some it means the software or software as a service (SaaS) that outside sales reps use to keep track of their accounts, where they are in the sales cycle, etc. -- and that is a good definition. . .but CRM is much bigger than that.
CRM is really broken into two broad categories: "front office CRM" and "Back office CRM."
Front office CRM are the applications that actually touch the customer directly -- the voice on the phone in the contact center, an internet interface where they can place an order, customer service (again online or over the phone) or the live customer service rep (CSR). Any part where the customer is directly interfacing with your company is a form of "front office CRM."
And a logical touchpoint for UC and CRM to link.
The holy grail of the contact center for years has been OCR - one call resolution. Any problem that isn't resolved in one call, or any sale that can't be closed in one call ("we have an internet special where for the same price you are paying today you can add XYZ. . .") costs lots of money. Any customer service call that takes too long or requires "follow up" also begins to alienate your customers making them more inclined to leave you for another firm.
UC can dramatically improve the goal of OCR -- whether that "one call" is a phone call, an internet access or even your face to face outside sales rep.
It all has to do with the "hand off." Inside a contact center this can be done with intelligent routing (which is really what UC is in a larger scheme of things). We route the call to the most logical, not the first available, agent. With UC we are now moving beyond the barrier of the contact center and able to route the call to best person no matter what department they work in, or even WHERE THEY ARE physically.
Setting up skills routing takes time, but the rewards are immense both in customer satisfaction and in cost reduction.
All of this so far focuses on the connectivity between front office CRM and UC, but back office CRM can increase this cost reduction by quantum factors. Using a data warehouse (or perhaps data mart) to identify your most profitable customers you may choose to always route them to a specific department or person -- not blindly treating all customers the same but giving platinum treatment to platinum customers.
By contrast your lower value customers (in margins) can always be routed through an IVR (interactive voice response) unit and routed to newer agents. . . The dirty little reality in sales is that there are some customers that are not worth having because the amount of work they require (and work = expense to your company) may mean you actually lose money by having them as a customer. Back end CRM identifies who is profitable and thus worth retaining.
One to one marketing is a myth. We do not market to all of our prospects and customers in the same way and we shouldn't. Back end CRM's information on customer profitability can help determine who we route to whom in our dynamic, unified communications world.
This blog is speaking in generalities -- as if we had all the money and time in the world to link all of these disparate systems together. The good news is that many of these systems are already begining to be linked -- Cisco with Salesforce.com, Aspect with Microsoft, Avaya and SAP, Nortel offers integration to Microsoft Dynamics CRM and implemented Dynamics internally. The idea is to take advantage of the technologies you may already have in place such as a legacy Siebel implementation maybe using AT&T's Siebel Solutions offer) to improve relations with your customers and business partners through a streamlined "one call resolution" that goes far beyond the silos of "outside sales," "engineering," "customer service" across your business.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
The Irony of it All
My last blog posed the question: "Is Microsoft the next Dinosaur?" My point was that most companies have a lifecycle, just like products do and people do.
Microsoft may or may not be at the precipice of a decline -- it is really up to Microsoft. The thing I always admired about Bill Gates in the "early days" (and I was a UNIX fan since I worked for AT&T Computer Systems) was that he was always paranoid. He knew the internet could eclipse the OS as far as the center of the IT universe and so out came Internet Explorer. Microsoft tried to win the search engine war -- and after repeated lack of success has what looks like a nice product in Bing.
But no sooner did I post my Blog and get lots of comments (most not so nice from Microsoft proponents) along comes PC World with an article that asks the very same question I asked:
J. Peter Bruzzese, InfoWorld
Microsoft may or may not be at the precipice of a decline -- it is really up to Microsoft. The thing I always admired about Bill Gates in the "early days" (and I was a UNIX fan since I worked for AT&T Computer Systems) was that he was always paranoid. He knew the internet could eclipse the OS as far as the center of the IT universe and so out came Internet Explorer. Microsoft tried to win the search engine war -- and after repeated lack of success has what looks like a nice product in Bing.
But no sooner did I post my Blog and get lots of comments (most not so nice from Microsoft proponents) along comes PC World with an article that asks the very same question I asked:
Is Microsoft Following GM's Road Map?
Analysis: GM's bankruptcy marks the end of an era. Is Microsoft repeating the automaker's mistakes?
J. Peter Bruzzese, InfoWorld
// Jun 3, 2009 6:00 pm
"Microsoft has faced a few serious bumps over the last 10 years but came out fine. . .Knowing the work Microsoft developers put into their products, I believe they are the saving grace of the company -- as long as they are allowed to hear the voice of the people. This is an area where I've seen a problem."
I worked for AT&T at the hey day of Bell Labs. We had the brightest, most awesome minds around -- just like Microsoft does today. Microsoft ca be its own best friend or its own worst enemy. Only time will tell.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Surviving and Thriving: Marketing in a Recession
Every day there seems to be more bad news: Circuit City is out of business, closing nearly 400 brick and mortar stores. Home Depot is shutting down its high end Expo chain. Even Microsoft and Apple are seeing tough times.
But every cloud has a silver lining. There are ways to market your business successfully in a recession. The key is "knowing your customer" aka customer business intelligence. Who is buying? Why? What are they buying, and what are the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities there?
Which prospects fit a similar profile (demographics) of your high margin customers?
So identifying the market is (as always) the first step, but in these economic times it is even more critical that usual. "Know thy customer!"
The next step is knowing what appeals to them and then selling to them in a cost efficient manner that meets their profile and your product line. This may mean more targeted email campaigns with coupons, or eZines -- lower cost ways to reach your audience than traditional print advertising, or even "Google ads" and other online paid advertising.
You must know your "value proposition" as you go back to your base and target strategic new prospects. In one sentence (elevator pitch) why do they need you NOW? Can you save them money? Can you make them money? Can you help them sell more to their own customers?
This is a time of opportunity. Yes, it is scary "out there" -- but as competitors fall away or draw back they leave a vacuum which a saavy firm can fill. Realize that marketing is an investment, not a luxury. Like any investment you need to have a plan to invest wisely.
Just like the Dot.Bomb bubble burst we'll survive, and we can thrive. This too shall pass.
But every cloud has a silver lining. There are ways to market your business successfully in a recession. The key is "knowing your customer" aka customer business intelligence. Who is buying? Why? What are they buying, and what are the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities there?
Which prospects fit a similar profile (demographics) of your high margin customers?
So identifying the market is (as always) the first step, but in these economic times it is even more critical that usual. "Know thy customer!"
The next step is knowing what appeals to them and then selling to them in a cost efficient manner that meets their profile and your product line. This may mean more targeted email campaigns with coupons, or eZines -- lower cost ways to reach your audience than traditional print advertising, or even "Google ads" and other online paid advertising.
You must know your "value proposition" as you go back to your base and target strategic new prospects. In one sentence (elevator pitch) why do they need you NOW? Can you save them money? Can you make them money? Can you help them sell more to their own customers?
This is a time of opportunity. Yes, it is scary "out there" -- but as competitors fall away or draw back they leave a vacuum which a saavy firm can fill. Realize that marketing is an investment, not a luxury. Like any investment you need to have a plan to invest wisely.
Just like the Dot.Bomb bubble burst we'll survive, and we can thrive. This too shall pass.
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