I'm sitting in the SF airport in United's Red Carpet lounge at 8:00pm PST staring at a delay of about an hour for a red eye that was supposed to leave at 10:10pm, now its a very red pair of eyes leaving at 11:00pm so far. So, I have some time for final impressions and commentary and a few concepts that emerged from the CRMGuru conference and retreat.
There were around 40 delegates who represented roughly 15 countries and multiple companies in a variety of verticals. This was an articulate, intelligent group of customers - perhaps the smartest and most interactive I've ever seen. What emerged clearly from the delegates mouths was that they were struggling more with culture change than any other single issue that I saw. I moderated a panel on CRM Technology Trends that, when opened at the beginning to the delegates kept getting questions that were best represented by "how do you convince a company to implement CRM technology when they are resistant - even if we have it already?" Not exactly a technology trend but in multiple ways and styles, this question emerged in every domain of CRM discussed. How do you convince a resistant culture that a customer-centric organization is something that they should have? Or, in what way do you approach an organization that can't see that it has problems with it's customers? When we were discussing the implementation issues being brought to the attention of senior management, one delegate from Mexico, who had clearly had been burned more than once for having the courage to speak up said, "Don't you be the one to tell senior management about the problems, because you'll be the one on the spot." While few delegates agreed with this, what was obvious is that this delegate had stood up to help management faces its technology implementation issues and got slammed. I actually do recommend "you" (whoever you are) do tell management, but that's easy to say when you're not in the environment with your job on the line. The ultimate answer the Mexican delegate gave was "hire and consultant and let them tell management!" Which has its merits too.
What I observed from this conference was that the old methodologies and concepts that characterized "classic" CRM meaning all the world is siloed into a horizontal sales, support, marketing barn while still germane are going away. The people/cultural/behavioral/organizational issues are becoming a significant concern as are reorganization of processes and workflows. Strategies are becoming rich, ongoing and dynamic but this is not something that has been really mastered as either science or art yet. In other words there is a more whole brained approach to CRM beginning to waft in the breeze, but it is hardly at high speed yet. In fact, several months ago, Denis Pombriant, one of my favorite analysts (along with Chris Selland and Michael Maoz and Sheryl Kingstone) wrote an article on right brained CRM.
The other observation, which of course, I'm totally biased in support of is that there is kind of a small but growing group of CRM managers that recognizes the need to create the collaborative environment and tools to give the customer control over his own experience with the company. My presentation was called "In the Hands of the Customer: Designing the Self-Managed Customer Experience" and it was extremely well received. But I'm hardly the voice in the wilderness on this. Check out Chris Selland's weblog in his entry "Profiling and Lying." He references the same idea. Look at it simply. Don't you want to control your own life? Shoot. I do.
The interest in how to collaborate with your customer to craft that experience which in its youth was the voice of the customer is now of major concern with little knowledge on how to go about it and how complex it can be. One of my clients, BearingPoint, had me write a white paper on this subject which will be out pretty soon. I'll keep you posted on when this one is going to be available.
What is clear is that "classic CRM" about as tasty as Classic Coke is going away though its best ideas and methods remain. As became evident through conversations with the delegates and lots of other anecdotal evidence, CRM is evolving to something that requires genuine conjoint activity 'twixt customer and company (and the brandholder's value chain too) and this to create the kind of customer centric culture that will happily provide the tools and means for the customer to manage and control their own experience with the company. Give the customer an informed choice and the right to make their own decisions intelligently and they'll give your business value almost every damned time.
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