CRM - December 2008 - (Page 26)

YEAR IN (P)REVIEW Transparency is at the forefront of the changing CRM landscape. It’s at the core of the Web 2.0, social media uproar. It’s the root of the customer experience. And it’s behind loyalty, retention, and customer devotion. Drivers of transparency include social communities, data proliferation, CRM maturity levels, massive increases in connectivity and interconnectivity, and the changing demands of today's spenders—in other words, basically every cover story and feature story we’ve written over the last 12 months. One year ago, CRM Senior Editor Marshall Lager wrote an award-winning year-in-review feature story (“It’s All Coming 2.0gether,” December 2007) focusing on the advent of Web 2.0 and what it means for the software ecosystem overall, and for CRM in particular. The predictions were fairly spot-on. A new wave of CRM is emerging and CRM thinkers are itching for new branding—“CRM 3.0,” “Social CRM.” It’s all about taking the notion of the “always-on, always-connected” customer—see “Always On,” February 2008—and recognizing that those customers need to have access: not just to your products and services, not just to your customer service unit, but to your employees, your suppliers, your partners, each other—if they’re going to fork over the cash, they want an allaccess pass to what’s going on. Are you prepared to give it? T IS FOR TRUST Transparency doesn’t automatically guarantee your customers’ trust, but it’s a major building block in the equation. “One of the keys to the CRM cycle is going to be building trust over time,” says Gartner analyst Scott Nelson during a one-on-one discussion of social media’s impact on CRM. Most companies have yet to realize that building up a level of trust makes it, as Nelson says, “highly unlikely a customer [will] leave you and go somewhere where they’re going to have start all over again.” and customer data occasionally conflict, Nelson cites one mortgage company’s upselling efforts: The company crosschecked the names of its home-loan customers with a list of consumers recently granted credit approvals for new-car purchases. The company then contacted those overlapping customers, informing them of a car-loan promotion. As cunning a plan as this is, some customers might be nonplussed—or even offended—to discover their mortgage companies are keeping tabs on their other financial activities. Other customers may “Part of [transparency] is opening things up and letting other people provide value…. [Make] it about the solution that the customer wants, regardless of how you get it to them.” But there’s also a danger. “On the flipside, you’ve got to be really serious because all it takes is one breach in that trust for them to say, ‘OK, you’ve burned me. I’m not going to trust you again.’” merely chalk it up to coincidence. Where’s the line? A few years down the road, consumers may expect so much transparency that marketers will no longer be able to strategically promote and upsell. As the issues around transparency and the use of customer data proliferate, Nelson says companies will have to be more careful about divulging such privileged information about any single individual. But the reality is that you may not be dealing with customers on an individual THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES Removing barriers between the buyer and seller raises many questions. How does an organization stay strategically competitive amid consumer demands for transparency? As an example of how transparency The Cool Kids Each year, Gartner anoints a handful of up-and-comers in the CRM world as its Cool Vendors. Here are the ones in sales, marketing, and customer service that made the cut in 2008. Interestingly? They’re not all based in the United States. SALES • Lemonade (social network advocacy) • Aggregate Knowledge (Web-site behavior recommendations) • GetAbby (virtual sales assistants) • SalesCentric (organization-chart management) • Xmonic (collaborative account planning) MARKETING & ANALYTICS • Cvent (on-demand event management) • EveryScape (photo-realistic, interactive, virtual environments) • Saepio Technologies (brand management) • Vitrium Systems (real-time PDF document and content management) CUSTOMER SERVICE • LandSonar (fleet transportation planning) • Fizzback (mobile feedback management) • SupportSpace (expert-staffed consumer-support platform) • Ydilo (mobile information, transactions, and billing) 26 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | DECEMBER 2008 www.destinationCRM.com http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/crmmedia/crm1207/index.php?startid=22 http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/crmmedia/crm1207/index.php?startid=22 http://www.destinationCRM.com

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

CRM - December 2008 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Rave Is Over CRM on Twitter Financial Frenzy Will Customer Experience Survive in a ‘Soft’ Economy? Holiday Humbug Empowered Consumers Are Ready to Flip the Switch Required Reading Transparency Spiff Up Your Site! They Aim to Please Mixing In a Little Sugar Sweetens the Deal A Newsletter Employs New Tactics A Site Stops Feeling Overtaxed Make ’Em Laugh—Personally Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Scouting Report Pint of View

CRM - December 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.