Resolutions 2011: adapting your CRM approach

Jul 7

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Photo credit: Captain Crank

Mark McDonald – group vice president and head of research in Gartner Executive Programs- wrote recently in his post “Three things to think about as you plan for 2011″ that everyone is social.

And yes, – according to Mark – one needs to plan for how to use technology in general and social media. In particular to bring the two together in order to capture the energy, talent and potential of your people, their experience and their insight.

Mark did not mention the changing role of customers. But I think, he is quite aware of the fact that one has to acknowledge the facts that the role of customers is changing dramatically.

In this decade, marketeers, operations managers and management have to acknowledge the fact that customers own the conversation.

Now customers have taken control, they’ve also become more willing to share information.

Nowadays, privacy is not such an issue anymore. What I am doing, my lifestream, where I am going and where I am with exact locations at a given time are all data that trendsetting consumers are already sharing openly with peers, friends, companies and uneven unknowns.

However, there is one – essential – prerequisite: trust.

Remember that in 2001, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, the No. 1 barometer for whether an individual trusted a company was its financial returns. In 2010, the top indicator is now whether a company is transparent and honest. Trust not only limited to companies but to anyone in the network.

It was John Goodman of TARP fame who indicated how many times bad and good experiences were distributed in the personal network in the 1980.  And now, consumers have become even more skeptical, more willing to complain, more willing to leave you for a bad experience.  Some claim that almost 90% will tell  friends about their bad customer experience.s; 25% of them do  that on social media.”

That is going to shift rapidly, are the predictions. By 2015, 75% will tell other people about a bad experience with a company via social media. With consequences for the reach of that complaint in the networks, but also adding richness in your possible CRM-approach.

What might be the consequences for planning your CRM approach 2011.

  1. A first – often forgotten step – is to estimate the number of contacts, your customers prefer in the various channels. How much is done by phone, mail, social media, retail outlets, websites, mail or even fax?
  2. Add to this quantitative analysis a qualitative one. What is the performance in the eyes of the customer, the client, the frontline staff?
  3. Check your resources for an environmental scan. What are emerging technologies that might impact you. What are your competitors doing and what are they doing not? What seems to be become best of class practice in any industry?
  4. Align your resources according to the forecasted contact volumes and determined priorities. Implying an aggressively upgrade of competences in those fields that are relatively new to your organization.
  5. Finally, the three fundamental blocks of CRM will undergo changes. Currently, - as recently mentioned by Gartner – 90% of CRM spending is for operational processes, a little more than 9% is for analytics, and roughly 1% is for social CRM. Gartner predicts that will shift over the next five years to a mix of about 70% operational, 20% analytics and 10% social.

Do you agree that this is an effective way  - at the organizational, professional and personal level – to capture the energy, talent and potential of your people, their experience and their insights in the forthcoming era of Social CRM?

Photo credit: Captain Crank
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Posted on 2010/07/07, in CRM, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Web 2.0 and Information Technology,, Vision, visionaries, vision things, trends and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.