Technology

CIO Insight Magazine's August issue featured an interesting research study with regard to CRM projects. The survey headline, Will Old Problems Sink New Users? says it all.

From my perspective, the focus continues to be technology, when the customer's needs, values and expectations must be placed at the forefront. So yes, as long as IT departments lead these projects, "old problems will sink news users".

The acronym CRM is a confusing one. Many people say it stands for Customer Relationship Management, while others suggest Customer Relationship Marketing. Let's take a look at how both of these acronyms are playing out.

Customer Relationship Management

Adopting a customer-centered marketing strategy sounds simple. Focusing on the customer's needs, values and expectations, and subsequently providing value for the customer, is a goal to which many companies aspire, but far too few deliver. The key to successful implementation of a customer-centered strategy comes with the realization that technology alone cannot solve any problem without the people and processes in place to make it actionable. The reality is most companies don't have an integrated infrastructure-technology, people and process-in place to support such an initiative.

It goes without saying that Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) is one of the most prevalent and important initiatives undertaken by corporations both large and small. Yet, industry experts claim that nearly five out of every ten CRM initiatives fail. What's the difference between those that succeed and those that fail? What does it take to successfully implement CRM?

The wireless age is upon us, but as many of you know, it's plagued with challenges. Chief among those challenges are limitations in bandwidth and costs for developing applications and supporting infrastructure. One start-up, Roamable (www.roamable.com) is attempting to work around those challenges by leveraging the infrastructures that most organizations already have in place. Roamable's technology platform allows an organization to offer content to users in a format with which they are already familiar-e-mail.

When CRM began to evolve in the mid-90's every software vendor who had an application that had anything to do with managing customer or prospect data began pitching itself as a "CRM System". Many of these systems were built to address one particular aspect of CRM, such as Sales Force Automation (contact management, Campaign Management, or Customer Analytics, and could not possibly deliver the value promised as "CRM System". It was a case of "over-promise and under-deliver".

Crossing the Chasm author: Geoffrey A. Moore asin: 0060517123

In the last four years, billions of dollars have been spent on CRM technology that doesn't live up to its promise. A recent Gartner study suggests that nearly 60% of managers will view their CRM initiatives as failures. Organizations are wise to be skeptical of CRM system capabilities, but they themselves are as much to blame as the system vendors. Many of the organizations that have failed with CRM because they did not conduct appropriate cost-benefit-analyses, reevaluate processes, procedures, and organizational structure, or fully-develop CRM as a business strategy.

One of the golden rules of successful marketing, as you well know, is the ability to deliver the "right" message to the "right" customer (or potential customer) at the "right" time. The CRM movement has managed a credible job helping us all to pull together the "right" message for the "right" customer, but we yet to be able to deliver that message at the "right" time. In other words, we still have difficulty in getting a message to the customer when s/he is predisposed to buying.