The Empty Whitecoat

20 random CRM and Marketing Lessons

1. If the brand promise cannot be met, don’t waste money on branding

2. Without the right customer culture, any CRM programme WILL fail

3. Customer focus begins and ends with strong leadership

4. If companies spent as much money on selecting and training their customer-facing staff as they do on their advertising and promotions, they would be more profitable

5. Giving customer-facing staff the freedom to deal with customers as they deem appropriate will reduce costs in the long-term

6. Outsourcing of customer service teams creates bland customer experiences and reduces competitive advantage

7. CRM creates an over-reliance on customer data. Data alone will NOT provide the insight a company needs to innovate

8. Without an appreciation of customer context, companies will never understand customer behaviour

9. Most companies use CRM to improve their own profitability and productivity, not their customers’. If they did, they would be more profitable

10. When managers talk about a “single view of the customer”, what they really mean is a single view of their organisation, systems, processes and data

11. If you can't trust your customers, your customers will not trust you

12. Customer loyalty is built on emotions, not promotions

13. The most loyal employees can be the least customer-focused employees

14. Championing the customers’ interests always breeds trust and loyalty in the long-term

15. If you use the brand to set expectations without first assessing the customer experience, the brand will fail

16. Implementing a CRM system without changing employee behaviour will always lead to failure

17. Marketers rarely innovate marketing

18. Knowing when to silence the Voice of the Customer is as important as knowing when to listen

19. Benchmarking is the sincerest form of imitation and the fastest route to commoditisation

20. There are never any answers, just opinions…

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New Consumer

New Consumer is the UK's only fair trade magazine, helping you to make the right choices when it comes to shopping. Fair trade has proved that buying goods can change the lives of millions of marginalised producers in developing countries by ensuring they get a decent price for their goods. The ultimate aim of New Consumer is to tackle poverty in developing countries by encouraging consumers to be responsible and change their shopping habits. Inside the magazine you will find fair trade product updates and reviews, articles about fair trade companies, fair trade fashion, and in-depth features about the people who benefit directly from fair trade. New Consumer is the ultimate ethical consumer magazine to show you that fighting the war on poverty has never been easier - the answer lies in your consumer choices! To subscribe click here.

Lean Consumption

In a recent Harvard Business Review article (March 2005), authors James Womack and Daniel Jones introduce the concept of lean consumption:

Despite consumers having access to an ever-growing range of products at lower prices, with fewer lemons, and from more formats, why is consumption often so frustrating? Why do we routinely encounter the custom-built computer that refuses to work with the printer, the other computers in the house, and the network software? Why does the simple process of getting the car fixed require countless loops of miscommunication, travel, waiting, and defective repairs? Why does the diligent shopper frequently retum from a store stocking thousands of items without having found the one item that was wanted? And why is this tiresome process of consumption backed up by help desks and customer support centers that neither help nor support? In short, why does consumption - which should be easy and satisfying - require so much  time and hassle?

It doesn't have to-and shouldn't. Companies may think that they save time and money by off-loading work to customers, making it the customer's problem to get the computer up and running, and wasting the customer's time. In fact, however, the opposite is true. By streamlining the systems for providing goods and services, and making it easier for customers to buy and use them, a growing number of companies are actually lowering costs while saving everyone's time. In the process, these businesses are learning more about their customers, strengthening consumer loyalty, and attracting new customers who defect from less user-friendly competitors.

They then present six "lean consumption" principles for firms to help solve their customers' problems and illustrate how companies can embrace them with reference to approaches taken by Toyota, Fujitsu and GFS - A Portuguese Car Dealer Group:

1. Solve the customer's problem completely by insuring that all the goods and services work, and work together.

2. Don't waste the customer's time.

3. Provide exactly what the customer wants.

4. Provide what's wanted exactly where it's wanted.

5. Provide what's wanted where it's wanted exactly when it's wanted.

6. Continually aggregate solutions to reduce the customer's time and hassle.

As it happens, the ideas embodied by Lean Consumption fit perfectly with OMC’s One Minute Customer concept – “How to Increase your customers’ productivity, profitability and prosperity” and particularly the work we have done in developing technology that “reverses” the marketing and purchase process – i.e. enabling consumers to specify their solution needs in order to allow businesses to respond with customised and context-rich offers and solutions. Check out our partner company, Conciera, for more information on the technology solution we helped build to enable “lean consumption” and also our white papers, "Changing the Long-Playing Marketing Record", "Building trust and relationships through customer advocacy" and especially, "ValuePATCH: A framework for building positive brand, marketing and customer context" which defines the "buyer-centric" logic and how companies can move into customer "consumption spaces" to address latent customer value. All are available free to download here.

Inspired by the Lean Consumption article, The OMC Group has a new white paper coming out shortly, “Smart Consumption: Your next customer strategy”. We will identify strategies and tips for achieving Lean Consumption of the kind described by Jones and Womack. Register here on The OMC Group web-site to receive a copy as soon as it published.