New Poster Boy for CRM

Sarwi—x
Member

Posted 11-Oct-2006 09:04 AM
I work in a Telecomms company in one of the largest countries in Africa. I have to say here that the buzzword for us (Customer Care) was CRM—How we needed to be Customer centric in everything we did... We went as far as creating a CRM stratgey that was to guide the way we interacted and treated our customers (our company is over 2,500 people strong). Now, the new buzzword is CEM—which I am yet to see where the huge deviation from CRM is, but that being said, what gives???

The principles posited by CRM are the same here. The subscriber/customer (the company is a B2C)would or should have been given a better experience courtesy of the CRM—Customer centric approach.

Where is the great differential that makes CRM any different from CEM? And I would like to add that I am up to my ears in new age CEM experts who are apparently different from those who were apparent CRM experts back in the day...

What would be the change in policy or strategy that would show the change in focus? Does anyone else have this problem?

It is a bit of a teeth gnasher since we have to cater to over 6 million customers.

Kregg
Member

Posted 11-Oct-2006 05:27 PM
Sarwi,

I have never worked in a B2C environment and I have no vested interested in promoting CEM, so I may be a little out of my depth here. But if I were to take a poke at your question I would suggest that there could be a very clear distinction between CRM and CEM. Traditionally CRM has been focused on the automation of processes as opposed to ensuring that the process itself results in a pleasant customer experience.

I can think of several ways this distinction may be important in the Telecomm industry. For example, you may have completely automated the call center with an infinite number of touch tone or voice activated options and menus for the customer to navigate. This method of CRM may result in lower costs of sales and support. But how does the customer feel about this approach? Personally I hate interacting with machines and when I can I instantly tell the machine I want to speak to a human being. Good IVR systems will quickly put you through.

You may have completely automated the billing and presentation process but if the customer has to sort through reams of paper and decipher cryptic codes and cross reference one to the other to figure out their phone bill, it is probably not a great experience.

If you have multiple products, services, divisions, or subsidiaries, each of them may have a great CRM system. But if they are not integrated or not able to share information, and the customer must be passed through a daisy chain of different agents, each knowing only a part of the customer's history or total breadth of subscribership, it is probably not a great experience.

You may have a great web site with a fully automated shopping cart and easy check out. But if the site is complex, difficult to navigate, and does not quickly and clearly direct the customer to their product or service of interest, it does not enhance the customer experience.

Maybe it is different in Africa, but I think most US citizens would tell you that dealing with the phone company is usually about as pleasant as going to the dentist. There just seems to be a lack of personal attention that most human beings appreciate.

To me, this is the difference between CRM and CEM. CRM technology increases efficiency, lowers costs, and helps the sales and support staff to be better informed about who their customers are and what they purchased and when. But technology is not always the answer when it comes to enhancing the customer experience. Sometimes it takes a true interest in making the customer feel like you really care about them and want to do whatever is required to make every interaction with your company a pleasant one.

If you are completely automated and feel you have nothing else to do or learn about CRM, perhaps you could take advantage of that automation and wisdom to propel your company in a whole new trajectory. Do you know for a fact that you are doing everything in your power to make the customer feels good about doing business with you? Would your customers refer you to their friends and family? Would they switch to the competition if they offered a price that was only a few pennies less?

Again, perhaps it is different in your country, but there is tremendous competition in the Telecomm industry here in the states. Unfortunately, most of it seems to be based on lowering costs at the customers' expense and growth through acquistion. Although I understand the significance of these strategies, I also think reducing churn is important and most traditional Telecomm companies are struggling to figure how to do it. The introduction of low cost VoIP hasn't helped them either.

Maybe the correct defintion of CEM should be Customer Elation Management?

Kregg Ray
Co-Founder AppShore Inc.
415-350-3472
kray@appshore.com
www.appshore.com

Dick Lee, CRMGuru Panelist
Advisory Board
Member
Picture of Dick Lee, CRMGuru Panelist

Posted 11-Oct-2006 08:55 PM
Sarwi—take heart. CEM is yet one more TLA (three letter acronym) being foisted on the market by people looking for a competitive edge.

For a bit of history—in the early 1980s, a relatively small group of us started seriously exploring the possibilities of something we called "relationship marketing." Unfortunately, we were stymied by lack of technology at almost every turn. Then, in the early 1990s, usable technology to support relationship marketing started to emerge. Nirvana? Hardly, because before very long the technology started becoming an end in itself. Whereas the original intent of what grew into CRM technolopies was to support more customer-centric business, the technology side of the equation started taking over. Throughout the 1990s and until now, tension between "CRM" as a business strategy and technology-based "CRM" has persisted—despite the fact that research has unequivocally established that CRM deviod of customer-centric business strategies is a dry hole.

In reaction to all this, the "CEM" movement started. And that would be all well and good, except that CEM promoters are trumpeting their movement as "original" and "innovative." Unfortunately, "CEM" has yet to go beyond the relationship marketing that started in the 1980s. In fact, "CEM" practitioners are relearning some of the same lessons relationbship marketers learned a decade and even two decades ago.

In your case, you're clearly among the CRM practitioners who never abandoned the relationship marketing roots of CRM. So you have nothing to worry about. Just keep on finding your "inner customer" and seeing your company through customer eyes, and you should be way ahead of the pack.

CEM is nothing more than a ginned up concept designed to sell books and services to unwitting customers. Ignore it, and you'll be the better for it.

Author Dick Lee is founder and principal of High-Yield Methods, a Twin Cities-based consulting firm specializing in helping clients achieve customer-centricity through CRM and proper alignment of process and technology. Dick is the developer of the Visual Workflow approach to business process improvement.

Bob Thompson
Founder, CRMGuru.com
Member

Posted 11-Oct-2006 11:30 PM
It seems every 10 years or so we need to invent a new term for an old concept. I agree with Dick that "relationship marketing" is the root of what we now think of as CRM.

But travel back to the 1960s and you'd find that academics researching "industrial relationships" (what we now call B2B) set the groundwork for relationship marketing.

Loyalty research, 1 to 1 marketing, direct marketing, ... and on it goes. Are we inventing totally new things? No, but let's not diminish the contribution of these developments as just new terms.

Congrats to Sarwi for practicing CRM as a business strategy. CRM should be about loyalty, and loyalty is a two-way street. Unfortunately, CRM has a technology slant in the minds of many people. For example, it doesn't help that 5,000 people at Salesforce.com's recent conference heard how easy it was to implement "CRM" by using Salesforce.com's SFA technology.

I welcome Customer Experience Management as a new term if it will help business executives focus on the value customers receive. Maybe CEM is not a new idea, but an old idea well executed is still progress.

My advice: ignore all TLAs and focus on developing and executing your customer-centric business strategy. Your customers will have the final vote on whether it's working. Good luck!

Bob Thompson
Founder, CRMGuru.com

Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist
Advisory Board
Member
Picture of Jim Barnes, CRMGuru Panelist

Posted 12-Oct-2006 09:06 AM
Sarwi and colleagues

Enough with the acronyms, already! I don't really care what we/they call it, as long as they are doing it. I agree with much of the sentiment expressed so far, namely that both CRM and CEM (and CM?) are part of a philosophy of business that places the customer squarely at the center and is intended to build long-lasting relationships (loyalty) through the creation of a value proposition that includes much more than great products (that's where experience comes in). There is, I suspect, also some agreement that we can do both CRM and CEM with or without the involvement of technology. So, why are we concerned which is a subset of which. They are both approaches to management strategy. We will find many different definitions, interpretations and applications of both. The approach that a firm buys into must be right for them, regardless of what they call it.

Jim Barnes

Jim Barnes specializes in Customer Strategy as a member of the CRMGuru Advisory Board. For more information, please visit Barnes Marketing Associates.

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 12-Oct-2006 09:31 AM
It is simple really.

CRM is what companies do TO customers. At least the variety of CRM practiced by 99% of companies. It is typically based on generating the most revenue from each customer transaction at the lowest cost.

CEM is what companies do FOR customers. It recognises that value must be shared with customers as well as extracted from them and that value is delivered over the end-to-end customer lifecycle.

Both CRM & CEM are at risk of being overtaken by Customer Co-creation (CCC) where customers work closely with companies to drive innovation, marketing, sales & service. P&G, GM, Eli Lilly, Toyota, Burger King, Danone, all have made serious investments in CCC experiments. And they are all expanding their investments. Google just invested USD1.6Bn in one very big such experiment.

CCC is what companies do WITH customers. And what customers do with each other. It recognises that customers increasingly want to be involved, that they typically know more about how a company's products are used than the company itself and that the best marketers and salesmen are other satisfied customers.

In a nutshell; CRM is an inside-out view based on company profitability. CEM is an outside-in view based upon mutual value exchange over the longer-term. The new boy on the block is a customer-inside view based upon mutual value creation in its entirety.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Francis Buttle
Member

Posted 12-Oct-2006 03:44 PM
Here's my two penn'orth. What's it like being a customer of your own company, indeed of any company? That's the customer experience question. The answer is that you use products and services, interact with the company's people and processes (maybe), encounter their customer-facing technologies (maybe), read their ads (maybe) and hear good or bad news stories (maybe). Customer experience may have something or nothing to do with CRM technologies. If you buy online, search a website, access a portal, buy from a sales rep who uses product configuration software, raise a query with a contact centre you encounter customer-facing technologies, so CRM becomes part of CEM. It's part of your experience of doing business with that company, for better or worse. Bad CRM implementations can wreck customer experience, good implementations can enhance it. My telco has improved my experience as a customer; my bank has damaged it.

Francis Buttle, PhD, FCIM
Professor of CRM
Macquarie Graduate School of Management
Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
+61 (0)2 9850 8987

Doug Leather
Member

Posted 12-Oct-2006 10:24 PM
I guess it's all the different interpretations and perspectives that make our lives interesting..............

Whilst I fully support Graham with the concept (and practice in some cases) of involving customers in innovation and value co-creation we are still fundamentally talking about Customer Management (CM) The prolific debate recently about the interpretation of CRM and the impact that this association may have on the CRMGuru brand is testament to this.

Definitions and clarity are important to me in order that we all begin at the same departure point.

If we step back to our interpretation and definition of CRM or CM we all agree that it is a 'way' of doing business. It is a philosophy, it's a set of well aligned practices extending across the entire organization such that the business is able to deliver a consistent EXPERIENCE.

Our definition of CM is 'the way an organization designs the customer experience in order to acquire, develop and retain profitable customers efficiently for the mutual benefit of employees, customers and shareholders'
(BLAH, BLAH, BLAH)

Customer Experience is a blend of the physical performance and the EMOTIONS evoked, measured against customers expectation across all the brand interactions.
CEM is therefore a sub-segment or sub-element of CM. This doesn't diminish it's importance in any way. CEM is about the proactive design and management of the experience (as per abovementioned definition) at each touchpoint.
Customer commitment (note, commitment and not satisfaction) is an important measure of the success of CEM.

In the end it's probably best to recognize these various iterations (or
approaches) as fundamentally similar and the winners will be those organizations that manage to align their processes and practices around that age old, and much debated, TLA called CRM, or whatever else the organization chooses to call it.

Now..........be careful with that pet rock!

Regards
Doug

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 12-Oct-2006 11:42 PM
Doug makes an important point when he talks about emotions, but perhaps not in the way he realises.

One of the key differences between thought & practive in traditional CRM and the newer CEM is the emphasis CEM places on emotions. The idea that customers assess an experience, or part of an experience, based upon both the functional benefits they receive and the emotions associated with receiving the benefits.

But what does the word 'emotions' really mean?

Neurobiologists, like Antonio Damasio in his book "The Feeling of What Happens", show that 95% of the processing we do happens without us being aware of it. Emotions and feelings play a major part in this.

Let me give you an example. We are walking along in the countryside and we see something in the long grass—we see what looks like a snake. This triggers changes in our body state based upon the trigger and our prior experience with it—our heart rate rises, adrenaline is released and we adopt a fight or flight body state, particularly as we have had a close shave with a rattle snake in the past. This is a very emotional state, but it happens in a fraction of a second and we are still unaware of it. The changed body state may trigger the conscious brain to process the trigger, particularly if the trigger is new or significant—we recognise that what we see is a snake, and from its markings that it is a harmless grass snake. This generates conscious feelings that further reinforce or adapt the emotional body state—we sense that our body is tensed and experience a strong desire to move away from the snake, but we now know that it is only a grass snake and is not harmful so we can start to calm down. Trigger—Non-conscious Emotional Body State—Conscious Feelings—Adaptation of the Emotional Body State. All mostly non-conscious.

So what you say. Well, if we are designing experiences (and taking the functional benefits as given), we not only have to design them for the conscious feelings we experience, but also for the non-sconscious emotional body states the experience induces. This typically means that we must build subtle cues that stimulate all the senses into the experience, not just the visual clues that experience designers typically think about. This requires that we understand how the brain and the body process these cues. For instance, the London Dungeon uses sub-sonic sounds—that we cannot hear, but that we can still sense—to build the emotion and feeling of anxiety in visitors. And believe me, it works.

It also means we have to understand how customers are likely to have experienced similar things in the past and how they are likely to experience all the clues and cues about the experience in their entirety. This requires that we really think like customers and understand the outcomes they are trying to achieve during the experience. For instance, although customers are used to talking to CSRs in call-centres, they have very different expectations should they have to ring the emergency services because their house is on fire. Even though they probably have no personal experience of such things.

So next time you go round something labelling itself as an "experience", or go off in the wilds to have one of your own, think about all that you are experiencing, what is happening to your body state, how it makes you feel and what that means about whether you will want to experience it again. Oh, and watch out for snakes.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Paul Greenberg
Guru
Member

Posted 15-Oct-2006 04:03 PM
Jim Barnes is so right. You can call a management strategy that centers value in the customer and identifies the left-brained process, technology and metrics focused and right brained cultural transformation and emotionally/behaviorally focused totality as anything you want to call it. Ultimately, where the big issue is how much of it is "management" of the customer and how much "collaboration" with the customer? Not whether its CRM or CEM. Ultimately, who cares what you call it, but it has to work? My definition of CRM in Feb 2003 in my CRM Magazine column Reality Check was (and remains to this day)"CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy supported by a system and a technology, designed to improve human interactions in a business environment." I also say that CRM is taking the art of life and making it into a science of business. That could be CEM, that could be anything you damn well please. You pick it. But you should also do it.

Sarwi—x
Member

Posted 18-Oct-2006 03:26 AM
It is heartening to see that fundamentally we are all coming from the same place.
I particularly like what Graham Hill and Doug Leather said...it is about what emotions you invoke in your subscribers/customers.
Dick Lee said I should continue with the ideology that we had been using i.e. the basic principles of Customer Management.
And that I think would be the right way to go.
No more TLAs...
Thanks guys for your input!
You should be hearing more from me as the days go by...

Jeremy Cox
Member

Posted 03-Nov-2006 07:13 AM
Sarwi -x, I'm with Dick Lee on this.
CEM is an aspect of CRM that is all.
Those who embarked on CRM initiatives but ignored what it was like to be on the receiving end for the customer, simply haven't finished the job.

Jeremy Cox MA DipM
Managing Director
The Wisdom Network Ltd,
www.thewisdomnetwork.com

Khun Per
Member

Posted 13-Nov-2006 10:21 AM
hi Sarwi -x,

As has been said by words, CRM is from the company out to the customer, for anything the company knows about the customer from previous transactions; so all about relationship. It measures, who they are, what they buy and what the company should offer based on behaviour; but driving profitability from a cost of sale prospective. On the other hand EBM is from the customer INTO the company (something I have said about the like of Tom Siebel's claims for over five years, as to where his theory about CRM being the silver bullet to solve "everything") this is here he did not understand. EBM Is about Experience as seen from the customer, so what did they want, what did they get and what should they have gotten. This is still to drive profitability; but as seen from a cost of QUALITY perspective! If there is a gap be what the company thinks it is deliviring and the customers experience as the point of pain or delight, when this is delivered, then Huston we have a problem. (I call this Expectation Management! I have some good graphics on this, which I will be happy to send if you request at pclind@yahoo.com).

In either case, there is a crucial thing that has been forgotten until recently; namely that if you do anything and you dont measure it, it will NEVER matter anyway! That brings me to the newer bridge between Customer Marketing and CRM and EBM: Enterprise Feedback Management. With the internet, the increase in various channels, it is imparitive that we measure everything we do, so feedback from every stakeholder group (employee, customer, investors, suppliers and whoever else you deal with) must be measured in 24/7 availability in any channel the stakeholder wants to use. Our advance in this strategy is shown in the five steps to true customer centricity. Basis of this is that most companies collect feedback on their activities today; but only 50% use it to drive insights (second step) and almost noone advice the stakeholder what has been don in relation to their feedback to allow the stakeholder to tell the company that the issue has been resolved (the fifth step). This must be seen in a graphic representation, so again please ask me for this if you are interested.

There is much more in the game of customer centricity, but I have run out of breath with this smear and if you have made it this far, I will stop here, so you can get some work done. Get the slides, then you will understand in 2 seconds!

Per Lind
CEO
The Little Mermaid Group
pclind@yahoo.com

John Turnbull
Member

Posted 20-Nov-2006 03:09 PM
What's in a definition anyway?

Unfortunately, definitions and common usage are important. People see a phrase, an acronym, and immediately interpret it. So, whilst we may have been defining CRM for many years as a business strategy rather than a technology project, some interested parties have succeeded in hijacking the term "CRM". Whether we in this forum like it or not, the vast majority of managers in business see CRM as "implementing a CRM system".

For this reason, I like the shift to CEM. It puts the emphasis in the right place—the customer and their experience. As has been said above, this forces the outside-in thinking, the appreciation of the customer's world and their emotions, rather than just putting in some technology and processes and expecting business outcomes.

My experience is that if you continue to use CRM as a term, you have to continually redefine it for your audience. Why bother? Just use CEM instead! I sometimes talk with clients about CxM where "x" can be any letter.

Finally, the term "CM" works well as an overall concept, as in the end its about managing all aspects of the customer; the relationship, the experience, your processes and systems, etc.

John Turnbull
CRM Consultant
www.customerconnect.com.au