If any new marketer was to ask Google what customer relationship management is, the results would reveal a host of technology partners: tools to help automate a brand’s interactions with its customers.
Ask that question of a lot of brands today and you’ll still most likely be pointed towards the person who sits cranking the email handle, blasting direct comms at their customer base. Or if you’re lucky, you’ll meet the person who owns the database, sitting on a key performance indicator (KPI) to grow it, but all too often without knowing why.
So why, in such a future-thinking and customer-centric age, are so few brands embracing customer relationship management (CRM) effectively?
The answer is because so few people get what it actually is and what it can do for their business.
What is CRM?
It’s a business strategy for starters. One that has the ability to transform an organisation from being product-centric to customer-centric. It embraces communications, data and technology to monitor, manage and improve the customer experience of your brand, across all interactions. It’s hugely accountable, driving profit direct to the bottom line.
Why is CRM so often marginalised to a platform or a channel?
- Because CRM takes effort
- It needs to be championed from the top down, so your CEO has to “get it”
- It means uniting siloed departments such as customer service, sales, marketing and IT around a unifying customer strategy
- It often means investing in knitting together legacy systems, or buying in new ones, so you can better understand and react to your customer’s behaviour with your brand
- Most importantly, it needs the right people and partners in place: the strategists, analysts and practitioners who are the lifeblood of CRM.
Liz Barnsdale is managing director at ais London
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