currently interested in awesomeness and how to create it

How does oil price affect CRM?

Denis Pombriant wrote an insightful piece on how the economy will change under the pressure of rising oil prices, and why CRM vendors should take that into account.

If fuel prices continue to increase — a reasonable assumption given rising demand for a limited (and most likely dwindling) supply — then we can expect more downward pressure on travel. Less travel means fewer face-to-face sales calls, and a greater reliance on technologies that will enable us to work with and administer customers in indirect settings. Less travel might mean fewer trips to the mall too, so I would expect that B2B and B2C commerce will be affected and that automatically means CRM.

We should see an acceleration of teleworking and, hopefully, a reduction in meaningless meetings and conferences – those that add little value beyond what’s already been stated in the agenda.

Likewise, I’d venture (and that’s a safe bet) a further increase of on-demand popularity. Instead of having to trudge to the office just so that you can log on to a dozen fat-client applications (or web-based, but equally firewall-protected), more and more office activities (=record keeping and communication) will be conducted online.

Having said that, I don’t see how the importance of human contact would diminish, even when it’s going to be a bit more expensive to meet. Some things are simply only going to happen when there are people together in a (physical, not virtual) room.

And so CRM is going to have to support both virtual and physical collaboration. It’s already doing both, and I suspect that, in the end, oil prices don’t represent the major shift that will steer CRM in a new direction – it’s already been happening for some time.

June 25, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

Apropos customer experience

Customer Experience might be the “new Quality” (as in: the new Holy Grail everybody is pursuing), and I’ve heard several speakers attack the issue at the just concluded Telecoms CRM & User Experience Forum here in Prague.

It differs from Quality in one important aspect, though.

Quality is a characteristics of the product. Once you nail it down, you can probably keep the unknowables in check. You’ve fixed the fundamentals: the product works as advertised.

Customer exeperience is defined and perceived by the customer. In a large retail environment, this means – if you aggregate similar experiences – still a huge variety of scores.

Which is why a think a technocratic approach to this isn’t going to yield a result similar to that achieved in the hunt for Quality.

It’s quite a different game here.

June 21, 2008 | Filed Under CRM | Comments Off 

Maybe CRM *can* save your soul

I am speaking about the “customer ecosystem” tomorrow. It’s a Telco event here in Prague. My talk isn’t Telco-specific but then, anybody can benefit from opening up a little, except perhaps prisons.

Soul-less businesses stand no chance in this brave new world. Just look at the beating AP gets for its ridiculous attempt to charge bloggers quoting its stuff. It’s time to cut those neckties and get real, folks.

June 18, 2008 | Filed Under Me & You, But Mostly Me, Rants | Comments Off 

Quote of the Day

Sun’s bs on social, social everywhere:

In order to continue the growth of social networking sites, I think that users will demand some changes. In fact, I’m probably not alone in being ready for some change. The big question is how this will be resolved. I think that some of the loose concepts around federation are very useful to help solve this. Depending on what kind of personal information you want to share, some it can be quite sensitive. Because of this, you want to be certain about how it’s stored and who you’ve given that data. The idea of a feed-based mechanism with a personal datastore like a Mine! can be quite compelling. In the end, the ability to manage and track my own data is the goal. The mechanism needs to be fairly straightforward and provide the ability for existing sites to adopt the functionality. In the short term, there may not be a lot of incentive for social networking site to adopt such a mechanism but it’s crucial for growth in the long term.

Social networks (and all other organizations keeping your data) would love it if they could keep it to themselves; customer data is the Holy Grail of CRM efforts and enables reasonably specific marketing communication.

I am more and more convinced, though, that they’ll have to give in to data portability (small-letter d and p) because we are all tired, tired, tired of filling the same registration forms again. And again. And again.

It’s your data – they should come to you and take a look if you let them. And use it according to your terms of service, not theirs.

via Adriana Lukas

June 17, 2008 | Filed Under Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

Got Twitter

I just got Twitter. I got it on my cell phone. Suddenly it makes sense.

On my computer, I can always get more information via e-mail, instant messenger, blogs. I don’t need tweets to learn about Iowa floods; I get it from Drudge. I don’t need conference twitterblogging when there’s liveblogging and, yes, live video streaming. Twitter can’t compete on detail nor depth of these channels.

On mobile screen, though, the experience couldn’t be different.

I am not a masochist to fire up Internet Explorer and try to scroll right, left, top, and down on AJAXed web pages where half of the stuff doesn’t work because of missing plug-ins, flash, etc., all that on miserable EDGE speeds. If I can have a status update, though, a teeeny bit that I can get back to later, a tweet can do that.

Hmmm.

I wonder about the adoption rates of desktop vs web vs mobile clients. Is the mobile community growing any faster, by any chance? Too late to find out right now, but I’ll get back to you later.

Not exactly an early adopter, am I.

June 17, 2008 | Filed Under Asides & Off-topic, Me & You, But Mostly Me | Comments Off 

Doc Searls on VRM

Doc Searls explaining VRM to a Telco crowd at Mobile Monday in Netherlands:

Worth watching. CRM 2.0 and VRM aren’t neither synonymous nor adversarial but complementary, and I am glad to see that both camps are finally coming together.

June 14, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Me & You, But Mostly Me, Software | Comments Off 

Quote of the day

I am with the author here, except the slide #52 and others suggesting that “ad-supported” content is OK with the young web power-users.

Sure it is. With AdBlock, all ads are perfectly acceptable.

SlideShare | View | Upload your own

June 13, 2008 | Filed Under Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

Customers are smarter than you

All of them.

Together.

Seth Godin seems to suggest that customers think they are smarter than they are, but that they aren’t:

Any time you ask customers to self-segregate, they will put themselves in the best line.

And just about any time you ask a customer to acknowledge that they were wrong, you will fail.

Fair enough. But if you ever fall for the idea that you can pretend to treat your customers as fine and intelligent individuals, but all your actions suggest otherwise, you’ll have a problem.

Even if 90% of your customers are less-than-brilliant, the remaining 10% will raise hell when they are treated like dummies. Don’t ever think you can out-smart the hordes of inter-connected, web-savvy “consumers”.

And why should you, really?

June 13, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

Quote of the day

[Customers] don’t care about “channels”. They care about convenience and appropriateness. They’ll use whatever channel is most convenient at the time they want to do something. And they want to be communicated to through the channel for which the message is most appropriate. – Ron Shevlin in Channel Preferences Don’t Matter

Agreed, though if I indicate my preference for e-mail over telephone, I damn well mean I expect NOT to be phoned. Plus, 99% percent of the time, e-mail will suffice; the possible exceptions being: your credit card has been skimmed, or: you’re 3 months behind on your payment schedule and we’re sending a death squad your way; not much more I reckon.

Forget channel preferences. Do NOT contact me unless you have something valuable to say, and valuable to ME, not just your perceived idea of me, that’s what I’d say.

June 7, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Links and Quotes | 1 Comment 

We don’t serve customers here


I stopped by at an optometrist today to have my sunglasses fixed. A 30-second job that most stores traditionaly do for free.

The clerk pointed to a big sign erected at the cashier’s desk that read, “We don’t repair glasses that weren’t purchased here.” He said they definitely wouldn’t do that and that they didn’t even have a price-list for that kind of service.

I have never seen any customers in the store. It almost looks as a front for mob money-laundering operations. But assuming it isn’t, I cannot fathom why it is still there.

A year after being turned down, a customer won’t remember the offense in detail. He’ll just remember he wasn’t served well. Even if the store had carried a variety of designer items for bargain-basement prices, a customer who had a reasonable request and wasn’t safisfied is likely to avoid getting turned down again and will take his business elsewhere.

The devil is in the small things. In the tiny things. Things that don’t cost anything to do properly yet will cost the business owner a fortune if they are ignored.

June 3, 2008 | Filed Under CRM | Comments Off 

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