There was a great keynote speech delivered this morning on some predictions for the future of CRM and the importance of making your organization customer focused. I worried yesterday that some of the material might be too academic and focused solely on Fortune 500 giants. This morning, Scott Nelson, Managing VP of Application Strategy and Governance, gave us actionable information that any size organization can use.
"As the world changes, as people access your company more and through different channels, firms are realizing they can't just do business as usual," Nelson said. "The world has changed. You need to understand what your customers want and how to collaborate with them."
Even the smallest company needs to realize that they can no longer just build a product, advertise and hope for the best. You need to interact with customers to find out what they truly need and together build a product or service that addresses a real need. That's how businesses of today are succeeding.
As the above shows, customers are interacting with companies in all kinds of manners. They speak with your sales staff, your customer service reps, your delivery drivers, your return department. They call you, visit you in person, and browse your website. Every one of these interactions matter.
"CRM is only as good as your weakest channel and last interaction with your customer.", Nelson powerfully stated.
He went on to give an example of a company that spent millions of dollars to hire the best sales people, the most understanding customer service reps, the friendliest delivery people. Every channel was perfect except their website was difficult to navigate and their return policy was poor. A customer that had to deal with either of these business elements was instantly turned off. All of the money spent in the other areas was for nothing.
He also made some predictions for the CRM landscape in 2006. Here are the ones that directly impact our businesses.
- Single view of the customer is huge -- Companies have finally realized that one of the most important benefits of CRM is the sharing of data. The fact that a sales man can see if a customer has any outstanding service issues before he calls can be huge. Business silos who don't want to share data prevent this key benefit from happening. In 2006, Nelson predicts that these barriers will be broken down, to an extent, in order to benefit the whole.
- Move to SOA will lead to slow growth in functionality -- As vendors begin to move Services Orientated Architecture (SOA) most of the work will be done in the background. Long term these solutions will be technically far superior to what exists today, but this comes at the expense of functionality. Little R & D will be done on functionality, so for the most part users should expect to see the same functionality for the next 2-3 years.
- 30% of SFA will be SaaS -- Lot's of acronyms, I know. Nelson predicts that the Software as a Service (Saas) will gain popularity for sales force automation (SFA). That's good news for the CRM vendors who practice Saas. Firms like salesforce.com, sagecrm.com, netsuite.com, etc... will reap these benefits.
Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question, also gave a wonderful speech on loyalty. I'll write more about what he had to say when I discuss his book next month. My expectations were greatly exceeded on how informative and entertaining both of these speeches were.
What i want to give emphasis about is the fact about sharing data info. Yes,there might be a heads top knowing the every issues of your clients.But if we put ourselves to the shoes of the customers, do we really like our database and service be shared with other companies?
Posted by: Daniel and Angeline Gleed | July 13, 2007 at 11:03 AM