ICMI's Customer Management Insight - December 2007 - (Page 34) TECHNOLOGY petitors’ prices and any horror stories associated with poor service. So the CRM business imperative has shifted. CRM is less about standardization to make sales, service and marketing more efficient. In a world where information is one click away, CRM is more about differentiating yourself in providing the best total customer experience. So CRM technology must also adapt. CRM technology must allow the whole company and its partners to participate in the total customer experience. RON WEGMANN CEO, Vertical Solutions CRM poses the classic chicken-and-egg scenario — which comes first, the customers’ needs or the busi- ness processes to support them? We believe that a company can’t get a handle on its customers until it understands and streamlines its business processes — those two functions must go hand-in-hand. Our software, the PowerHelp Suite, enables companies to deploy solutions that support their business processes in a modular fashion. Too many companies focus on tackling “the big picture” with enterprise CRM deployments that take too long to deploy, and don’t support improved business processes. Companies get trapped when they try to do everything at once — large, enterprisewide CRM projects get stalled when companies spend too much time trying to capture “nice to have” data when they should be focusing on capturing “need to have” data that support actual business functions. Based on what your clients have shared with you, what advances have you observed in how they gather and act on information about customers? What other trends in the past year are you observing with regard to how your clients use CRM software? PATRIC TIMMERMANS Director of Global and Industry Product Marketing for CRM, Infor Major trends are the use of CRM to build loyalty and create a unique and memorable customer experience. The goal is to generate additional revenue from existing customers through upsell and cross-sell opportunities. To achieve this goal requires a redefinition of a company’s CRM strategy. There is no place for marketing, sales, service silos in such a strategy. MARK ANGEL Senior VP of Corporate Development and Strategy, KANA Our clients are really beginning to see the great effect Web 2.0 can have on the customer experience. Now more than ever, companies are looking at blogging, wikis, collaborative Web sites, etc., to see how it can penetrate into their overall customer experience. For those companies, this is really their second attempt to getting the online experience right. They see this as a driving force toward improving their overall reputaicmi’s insight tion and completing their multichannel approach to customer service. What we’re seeing is a real focus on reputation for companies. Our customers are looking at loyalty as the core value of their product and they are looking at the customer experience process as the face of their brand perception. With industries consistently becoming more and more commoditized, customer service has become the defining factor between a company or product and its competitors. Companies today are more willing to make the investment in customer service, not with hard ROI in mind, but with the interest to see metrics of loyalty. Therefore, the big question we’re getting from our clients is: “Can you tell us how we can actually create a process good enough that it not only decreases customer churn, but increases our loyalty and recommendations?” I think we’ll continue to see this in 2008, as well; the demand for multchannel customer service will still exist and the customer experience will ultimately drive the loyalty and reputation of a company’s business. www.icmi.com | DECEMBER 2007 34 http://www.icmi.com
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