The Missing "R" in CRM
Whatever happened to the “Relationship” side of CRM? Despite huge investments in CRM initiatives, companies have mostly found that their customer relationships haven’t improved much at all . It seems that somewhere along the way relationship building got confused with process management, and effective customer engagement got sacrificed in the process.
There’s no easier way to poison a relationship that to try to manage it like a process, and customer relationships are no exception. Process derails intimacy. It deflects authenticity. And it’s often very offensive.
So here we are, 10 years after the dawn of CRM, and we’re still struggling to figure out how to effectively engage with customers. With most CRM systems in place today, the only relationships being managed effectively are the relationships between sales reps and their quotas . Talk about a fleeting relationship!
It’s time to move forward. Driven by the Web, we’ve entered an era when more effective customer engagement is a strategic imperative. Customers don’t want to be managed, they want to be served. The Web has raised their expectations. Customers vent on the Web and the world hears about it. They find each other and collaborate on the Web without any interaction with the company providing the product or service. For many companies, the Web is beginning to disintermediate them from their most valuable asset of all—their customers .
It’s time to stop deflecting and start truly engaging with your customers . Helpstream is the world’s first truly social customer engagement system that allows you to do exactly that. It’s more than a product, it’s a whole new way of thinking about CRM.
If you’re trying to reinvent your customer relationships, we’d love to hear from you.
Anthony Nemelka
1 Comment
Reader Comments (1)
I couldn't agree with you more Anthony with the comment "Customers don’t want to be managed, they want to be served". I have found that the problem with most companies is that they implement CRM Software without thinking why they need one, and they end up having a system that does not work for their business, and their customers