Past Thursday I had an opportunity to host a seminar on CRM for a group of experienced professionals. I have announced the education in my recent post, describing challenges and uncertainties around the topic and the potential audience. This post is written in form of a follow-up letter to the seminar attendees, but it might be interesting to many of you who deal with CRM and who are interested in what were the major take-aways from the intensive 6 hours CRM education.

Dear attendees,

thank you for taking part of this seminar that showed to be very productive and interactive, due to contribution of all of you.

All of my concerns before the education about the homogeneity of the group vanished when I received the first list with your names, your companies and business functions. The group was very compact in terms of CRM understanding as well as your experience in managing customer relationship or implementing CRM systems. A bank, several telecommunication companies and two CRM vendors made a perfect audience for a focused and productive education.

I really enjoyed the experience and I hope you did as well.

There are ten points that I want to stress out and that I’d like you to keep in mind as points to take away from the lecture:

1. No one needs CRM because it is fancy (’cause others „have“ it too) unless they plan to waist time and money
2. CRM often doesn’t need „implementing CRM“. In many cases, I’d rather advice you to take a look at you core processes and make it fast, responsible and transparent.
3. Basics of a healthy customer relationship management lies in you customer focused corporate culture in opposite to the one that arises from product or process orientation (remember our first exercise?)
4. When you work on aligning your company’s agenda with that of your customers, don’t forget about different motivations of your departments as well as talents and motives of individual employees
5. Manage customer experience through managing their perception. Perception is often tightly related to expectations. Take care! Expectations are set by your organization’s „CRM processes“, your marketing communication, as well as by your competitors.

   

6. Manage touch points. Those are the essential „places“ where customer experience occur. Try to use „Moments of truth“assessment in combination with customer expectations or even emotions as a powerful tool to manage total customer experience.
7. Customer data derive from customer oriented processes not vice versa
8. „Critical point of CRM implementation“ is the one where you know what do you want to achieve, why do you want it so much and what is the frame within you are able to do it
9. The message of the story tale „Wolf and the three piglets“ is that we have to build solid basis for a lasting survival (business) model. The same is with social media and their use in CRM ecosystem (sCRM): invest time, engage to get them engaged
10. …ah yes, segmentation. Some of you stated that you didn’t get enough. You asked for more. More of theory, more of tools, more of segmentation methods. It is homework for me and a great feedback from your side. Thank you.

When talking about segmentation, is not only about splitting customers into (more) manageable groups. And especially it is not just

about distinguishing them based on their spending (value based segmentation). It is about what does your offering or your organization mean for different customer groups (benefit segmentation). It is about events from the CRM ecosystem that create dynamic

segmentation attributes and micro segments. The segmentation is about the general approach to certain customer profiles, as well as small operational activities. This is in particular case for the segmentation of the CRM era where you are able to track in real time what your customers are doing, experiencing or even saying.

About trends of the future, remember that today’s products can become powerful interactive touch points. Use QR codes in combination with Web 2.0 tools.

I encourage you to try in your everyday work what you have learned. Think customer. Think expectations. Think experience at touch points. Think about service – the fast one, responsive and transparent.

Thank you for your active contribution and for sharing your time, energy and experience with all of us.

Alen

P.S. Feel free to comment about your experience or suggestions for further improvements.

© Alen Gojceta 2010