The following is a copy of an article I have written that has been just published in the latest CIMtech newsletter, addressed to CRM practitioners:
As a CRM practitioner, are you suffering from a dull, nagging pain in the forehead? Is it the case that everywhere you go, there seems to be somebody peddling some form of CRM Advice? For example, did you know that right now you could stop reading this and quickly download a free white paper on literally any CRM topic of your choice? You could learn how to "Organise for CRM", "Build Valuable Customer Relationships", "Design a Framework for Success", "Maximise your CRM Capabilities" or "Avoid Costly CRM Mistakes". If you wanted to, and I am sure you would, you could even read about how to embark upon "The Road to CRM Riches".
I suspect you won't download these papers. Rather, you already have enough information. In fact, you might be suffering from too much choice and too many strategic options to develop your customer-centricity initiatives. In short, you have a bad dose of CRM Advice Overload. You are so weighed down with best practice guidelines, thought leadership pieces, online seminar invitations, e-mail newsletters and webinars that you are paralysed by indecision. As a result, you are confused yet are working harder and harder to find that next breakthrough in customer value, the big one that will indeed bring you and your organisation the riches that you clamour for.
Customer Paralysis
Well, you may already know it, but your customers are suffering from a similar paralysis as well. They too have incredible choice, information, media and product surplus. They are equally burdened with a growing set of scarcities: shortages of time, convenience, attention, energy and satisfaction. And just like the modern CRM manager's problem, customers also find it difficult to make informed choices and smarter decisions from the sheer volume of available options. Yet critically, this modern customer problem is unlikely to get any better. That's because in many respects, just as you face confusion and overload from the CRM advice market, your customers suffer with dissatisfaction and excess from your CRM programmes. Now before I explain this admittedly contentious point, let me introduce you first to a couple of authors who share this view.
Customer Dissatisfaction
In a Harvard Business Review article in 1999, Fournier, Dobscha and Mick found a connection between CRM and relationship marketing practice and customer dissatisfaction. They identified certain negative outcomes arising from the proliferation of computer-generated personalised messages and the growing dependence marketers have on individual profile building and data gathering. They also reported on the problems customers face when attempting to respond to firms via automated contact management systems. Their conclusion was a startling one - each new successive customer relationship-building initiative or invitation can appear increasingly trivial and useless, rather than unique and valuable to today's customer.
CRM Misalignment
More recently, Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin in their widely acclaimed book, The Support Economy: Why Corporations are failing individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2002) make a bold attempt to explain the apparent misalignment between CRM practice and customer needs. They argue that despite the valid discovery of the individual in CRM and relationship marketing thinking, when exercised many organisations use the approach to pursue transaction and sales cost-efficiencies rather than fundamentally reinvent the means to create and deliver customer value.
So I argue that although there is a broad consensus that customer-centricity can boost a firm's bottom-line, its true potential has been undermined by an unreflective and narrow technical adoption, particularly by the techno-centric CRM software community and the "precision- and efficiency-centric" direct marketing community (there goes my future career in either, any donations gratefully accepted ...)
Customer-Centricity Can Work
Don't get me wrong, when done well, particularly when combined with a powerful authentic relationship-driven brand that is lived and enacted by all (OK, most) employees and delivered consistently through the customer experience both within and outside an organisation, customer-centricity can and does work. (Think Tesco, who effectively combine a powerful service and relational consumer / market orientation with a highly fine-tuned micro-marketing capability using Clubcard).
But for me, customer-centricity has lost its way precisely because of its overly analytical and process-driven systems dependency. It relies on more and more automated marketing and CRM solutions and technology as a means to manipulate and control customer behaviour and response in favour of sales, control, efficiency, precision, responsiveness and measurement (note that the word "relationship" was not on that list).
Problem: The Rise of The Machine
In other words, the problem is that when the brain is taken out of customer-centric management decision-making and put into a machine, (please pause and take a deep breath here), the customer simply becomes an object, a recipient of a predefined targeted piece of pseudo-personalised communication and a passive set of bytes in a database waiting for an automated event to trigger an automated response through an automated script delivered by an unempowered and (probably) bored call centre operative.
At this heart of this dominant form of "customer-centricity" are merely simplistic assumptions about customer behaviour, usually in the form of routine rules of thumb and "best practices" for guiding future management decisions. The difficulty with such approaches - and they are all too common - is that they often use and emphasise the wrong form of customer knowledge - only that about customers and not real learning or knowledge that individual customers possess or require to achieve their particular objective. Critically, an over-reliance on such basic hard data within CRM systems can limit a firm's scope and potential to innovate and experiment with new customer-centric perspectives.
So What Can Be Done?
Well clearly, playing with the old pieces of the customer-centricity game is no longer sufficient. Rather, we need to think of new ways to innovate for our customers, we need fresh perspectives, new thinking, clear concepts and a willingness to create and be radical. Put simply, the incremental stuff just isn't going to cut it in the future.
But finally, there is another dimension to the customer-centricity dilemma. Often, CRM and marketing practitioners emphasise the role of material conditions in shaping customer needs and demand rather than the wider context in which people select, buy and use products and services. Instead, by thinking broadly about the challenges people face, rather than narrowly about what firms can sell them, new ways to make customer lives easier and their decisions simpler can almost always be found. Truly innovative customer-oriented businesses understand this implicitly.
What's more, they aim to overcome these challenges by creating a more positive brand, marketing and customer context and interaction; one that reconfigures mostly intangible (and hitherto unrecognised) aspects of people's needs and problems into new forms of social, relational and brand capital. These intangible dimensions include new customer-centric value drivers such as time, attention, knowledge, uncertainty, trust, privacy, personal productivity and simplicity. By addressing these more human aspects of customer value, firms can begin to resolve the customer-centricity dilemma.
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