The focus to improve the experience and interactions with customers is becoming a key investment and priority. Organizations now realize that customer relationship management (CRM) has not met the expectations once set to manage customer relationships effectively. CRM does not help you manage customer relationships but automates internal functions in marketing and sales, customer and field service. Now, the goal to improve the performance or outcomes of customer relationships grows in importance and customer performance management will become just as important as other performance management efforts in finance, HR and operations.

Professionally, I now see many organizations are building customer management teams that can span across the line of business to assess interactions with customers and examine the current experience and satisfaction. Organizational structure and customer related processes are important but unfortunately are not enough to be successful. You will also need information and technology to manage customer performance and measure experience, interactions and satisfaction.

All of this activity points back to good management of customer information and the use of it into new technologies that can facilitate improvements to the customer experience. This is not a simple endeavor, as the integration of data into a clean and consistent set of customer information has to be established to efficiently deliver value to those who need the information including your customers. Evolving is a class of technology providers like Cincom, Ciboodle, ResponseTek and TeaLeaf entering a new segment to advance the art of customer experience management (CEM) with methods to automate and measure customer interactions to a successful outcome.

I hope that those of you who are focused on improving customer relationships take heed to new innovations in information management and applications that can help advance your efforts. Just investing into CRM and the 90’s approaches could inhibit your future. New approaches like customer experience management and customer performance management are now beginning to bring applications and capabilities that positively impact your efforts. If you are not, you could be spoiling your business faster than you are improving it.

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Regards,

Mark Smith
CEO & EVP Research