Related Topics:
			Business Research: Contact Center, Operational Imperative Research: Performance Improvement, Process Improvement Vendor Research: Consona CRM, Five9, IBM, Oracle, RightNow, Salesforce.com
			Printer friendly version Email this article Send feedback to editor

Take
When it was first founded, Onyx, the vendor of customer relationship management (CRM) software, understood that customer satisfaction is the key to maintaining long term, profitable relationships with customers. So simple objectives such as being able to have every customer on its reference list drove their behavior. But when the company went public, as is so often the case, profit took over as the main driver. This shift, in turn, changed the internal culture and drove away employees who didn’t like the change. Last August, M2M Holdings acquired Onyx and once again took it out of the public domain.

We are told by one senior executive who has been tempted to re-join that the M2M executive team want to return to “the good old days” and once more put the customer at the forefront of Onyx’s strategy. Although there will be more rigorous finical controls, the heart of the new approach is to put the customers first and ensure that they build long term, sustainable relationships. The customers’ voice also will be used to drive product development, we were told, to ensure that product offerings reflect changes in the marketplace. Ventana Research believes achieving these objectives can only be good news for current and potential customers. But to make it work, M2M needs to practice what CRM preaches and make sure that Onyx’s own processes become truly customer-centric, that internal metrics reflect this rededication – and, of course, that it keeps the products in line with customers’ expectations.