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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 

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