Customer
Relationship Marketing: Exposing the Dangers
What happens when you allow processes to
overrule common sense?
Donald R. Libey
Libey Incorporated
Advisors and Intermediaries for the Direct Marketing
Industry
You
may have noticed that most of our business and consumer contacts
and relationships have been relegated to a netherworld of digital
voice recordings, menus, endless loops, e-mail, PDAs, Google
searches, on-line account self-service and other forms of techno-denial
of you as an actual, living person with thoughts, feelings and
opinions of your own.
Somewhere
around 1995, the concept of Customer Relationship Marketing
or CRM began to get a toe-hold and to grow, similar to mildew.
All of the good things we used to do with and for customers
were suddenly bad ideas. Being able to actually answer a question
about your telephone service was no longer an “essential core
attribute” of the “advanced, interconnected and maximally
productive on-line model.” Solving a customer need could be
easily automated to any level necessary through a variety
of “decision trees” (algorithms), and every query, question
and problem solving solution could be “built into the system”
for “virtually-no-cost efficiencies” and “employee-reducing
productivity.” Ah yes, the promise of the free lunch.
And so,
in our genuine but naive belief in the wonder and magic of
technological solutions for everything, we began to adopt
these wondrous CRM systems in our catalog and direct marketing
companies; indeed, in every part of the global commercial
milieu. In a few short years we have abdicated our relationships
with our customers to software.
Now,
I have to ask you, “Does that make sense?” The answer is,
“No.” However, it makes little difference because there is
no turning back. They gotcha!
The
specter of the future of CRM
There
is no possibility of returning to the yesteryears of immediate,
satisfactory answers and solutions to customer needs by telephone
using people with knowledge and empathy. The momentum of the
economics has eliminated that option. While CRM is almost
universally spoken of as an enormous joke, it is also almost
universally at work to some degree in every company in the
western world. The sad fact is that you will encounter the
frustrations of getting anything done—easily, correctly and
intelligently—from this point out. And that level of frustration
will grow exponentially. There isn’t enough money to fix the
mess that has been interbred with your companies. You are
going to be spelling names on keypads in vain attempts to
hit on one who is actually an employee so you can find a human
forever. And ultimately you will “return to the previous menu.”
But,
the real power is in those CRM systems that automate, aggregate,
consolidate and analate transaction data! The Catalog Master’s
tools of square-inch analysis done with marked-up catalogs,
RFM, price discount “sweet spots,” quantity price break adjustment,
customer product propensity, and a host of other intuitive
and subjective arts are now so deeply embedded in CRM systems
that they are never likely to be seen again.
There
will come a day when we catalogers will “go back to the basics”
as we always do, only this time it will be the basics of human
relationships with our customers. We will realize that these
tentative and fragile relationships cannot be transferred
wholesale to systemization and the oblivion of digitization.
The real question that you have to contend with now, however,
is just how far down the path you are willing to go. You will
fight to the death to protect the sanctity of your customer
list and the asset you refer to as “our customer file,” but
with blind, embedded empathy and understanding systems you
are blithely giving up the reason that list exists: your relationship
with the customer.
Examine
the reality outside and inside your own company
Please
do the following experiment: call your telephone company and
attempt to have a phone number suspended for, say, 43 days and
reconnected at another location. Not an unusual request or one
that is too abstruse for human understanding. It can’t be done
because the systems don’t allow it to be done. You will have
to go through four or more steps and departments to make this
happen. You will become totally frustrated at the stupidity
and inconsiderate nature of the “customer relationship” so robustly
touted as a strength by the telephone company. If you could
find a good alternative, you would take it in a minute!
Now,
what has been inbred at your company that is similar? Have you
ferreted out the CRM embedded impediments that are losing you
good customers? Have you allowed “systems” and, specifically,
the insidiously named customer relationship management systems
to take over the fundamental reason for people doing business
with you: because they like you.
Here’s
my definition of CRM for you to think about:
Ninety-nine
percent of customers still only do business with people they
like. Convenience, on-line self-service, 24-hour access, secure
systems, automated transaction recommendations and suggestions
and all the other “techno-wizardry” does not change the basic
fact that if you want customers to like you, you have to like
them.
