CRM - February 2008 - (Page 26)

CRM MATURITY MODEL change. If different business groups are working toward different goals, incentive and bonus structures may need to be rebuilt to complement each other. Wollan says that it may be beneficial to give one person or one group full responsibility for the company’s customer centricity. “Some [firms] are revising the concept of the chief customer officer,” he says. “Some are actually taking it to an elevated C-level position and giving that person the mandate [over] customer experience.” Other options include giving more scope to the position of chief marketing officer or linking channels and bringing them together as a “shared service” capability. showing “only 3 percent of companies have achieved what we would call a ‘multichannel’ service offering.”(The lucky few tend to be more consumer-driven: telephony, retail, banking, technology, and healthcare.) The barriers are both processand technology-based: Nelson says that while CRM vendors are improving functionality,“the technology isn’t really there yet,” lacking a higher level of integration and ease of connectability. Anthony Uliano, president and chief technology officer of multichannel integration solution provider AMC Technology, cites an additional issue: “It sounds like common sense not to purchase something unless you know how to use it, but there’s just complexities of data-sharing, security, brand control, and confidentiality. Although no firm has fully reached this stage yet, Nelson says Microsoft is one of the frontrunners—and a good example of just how complex this level of integration can be: Microsoft must be able to see and control the interactions among any of its resellers and hardware vendors, because, as Nelson explains,“at the end of the day, one disgruntled employee at a Best Buy can make Microsoft look bad.” (See “FineTuning the Channel,” January 2008, page 30, for more about channel partners.) To gain complete control of your customer interactions, “you have to start in a place that pulls the entire ecosystem together,” Nelson says. Only the most advanced firms, he notes, are feeling the consumer pressure to make bold moves to reach Stage Five. Until one vanguard company establishes a template for success, a widespread move to Stage Five may be a ways off: “Because we haven’t seen anyone completely pull it off yet, it’s hard to know what to know,”Nelson says. Predictions for how long it may take can seem dire: “A decade may be very realistic,” he says. The ideal of CRM maturity is more than merely difficult to realize—in fact, not a single company has yet achieved it. STAGE FOUR: Walk Toward the Light In Stage Four—the furthest any company has progressed to date—CRM users begin to see light at the end of the tunnel: a focus on the customer at an enterprise level. Nelson explains that, in Stage Four, “CRM has to be a strategic direction for the organization and have key senior management support.” The issues are no longer merely organizational. Maturation into the fourth stage hinges on vision, and no longer thinking of CRM as a win/lose proposition. In previous stages, success was a measure of return on investment, separate from customer satisfaction; in this stage, these two measures become synonymous. “In the fourth generation, you switch over to the idea that ‘If the customer wins, we win as an organization. We can spend more money to take care of the customer and we’ll make more money for doing that,’” Nelson says. In Stage Four, all systems and channels are integrated internally—requiring a level of work, time, and investment that makes this maturation level very rare. McGeary cites a JupiterResearch survey 26 not a lot of best practices out there for multichannel-interaction vendors.” STAGE FIVE: Full Speed Ahead The fifth and final level requires that the idea of enterprisewide customer-centric alignment become more than just a short-term initiative, or one person’s pet project—fully mature CRM must reside at the very core of the corporate culture. Companies may get as far as the fourth stage and still fail: If, for example, a core vision is held by only one individual; when that person leaves, the vision may depart as well. “It takes years of consistently doing this, even as new management starts coming into various parts of the organization,” Nelson says. Another differentiator of this stage is that company channels must be aligned not just internally, but externally as well. This means that every partner, distributor, and joint venture—any firm that represents you in any way—must become part of the customer-centric multichannel framework. The obstacles here are manifold, including issues of technological integration as well as intercorporate LOOKING FORWARD Today, this five-stage model stands as more of an ideal than a realized business practice. However, analysts agree that the Stage Five endpoint is where companies are headed—and where their customers are pushing them to be. Even though no company has yet reached the Promised Land, Nelson says that “customers are expecting this more and more.”And where customers go, companies must follow. Bois says that staying competitive means realizing that customer satisfaction is the ultimate differentiator. Investments of time and money and other internal resources will pay off, he says, and firms that fail to make these investments will be left behind. “This isn’t something that companies can outsource or do on a shoestring,” Bois says. “The common thread is that the customer has the power now.” Contact the editors at editor@destinationCRM.com. www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | FEBRUARY 2008 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - February 2008

CRM - February 2008 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Loyalty Riddle CRM Drives Down-Market Out of the Gate: Marketers Rate ’08 Traits The Pulse Consultants Adapt to CRM’s Changing Landscape Required Reading Cover Story: CRM Gets Serious Contact Center Solutions Always On Rumble in the Office The Smallest Slice Tying Up Cable’s Loose Ends Burning Up the Paper Trail Sunny Skies for Knology No More Bumps for BlueRoads Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - February 2008

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