Reaching the CRM Saturation Point

Carol Smalley
Managing Editor, CRMGuru
Member

Posted 21-Oct-2003 10:27 AM
Posted by Carol Smalley (Editor) on behalf of [deb2you@rediffmail.com]

In the current scenario, CRM is vital for each organization, but don't you think there is a saturation point for everything? Will there be a time when people will be fed up with these kinds of relationships and their ultimate aim will be to buy a product/service by spending some money? If CRM is just a tool (and if you think practically),it will show that the ultimate aim of the customer is to buy a product, whether the organization adopts CRM or not, it will hardly matter to him/her. What is the future solution for this?

Carol Parenzan Smalley
Managing Editor
www.CRMGuru.com
carol@CRMGuru.com

Ballistix
Member

Posted 23-Oct-2003 04:59 PM
You suggest we might reach a point in time where 'people will be fed up with these kinds of relationhips' and prefer simply to hand over their money in exchange for products and services.

For a start, while you can have a relationship without financial transactions, you cannot have transactions without (some kind) of relationship.

Accordingly, your argument cannot be that we will ultimately transact without relationships—it must be that some kinds of relationships well be more appropriate than others.

Isn't the objective of CRM to deliver the nature of relationship most appropriate to customers?

And if so, why would our systems not continue to evolve so as to facilitate whatever is the appropriate customer relationship, from situation to situation?

Chris K
Member

Posted 23-Oct-2003 07:22 PM
I believe there is no saturation point in terms of what you mention. Remember that CRM is a front-end office tool for providing singluar,
consistent views of customers, how we relate to them, and of course the analytical functions for further improviding marketing/sales
and "assisting" staff build upon past and present transactions (finacial or not).

Perhaps you are right in some respects, people may get fed up with the "results" of CRM product usage (or its misuse). To be honest,
I am sick of filling out online forms, the "tell us about yourself" type entry screens, or inappropriate emails to customer channels due to missed criteria in the use of the analytical tools. The list goes on.

The internet savvy customer (aka everyone these days), can compare/contrast services and products very quickly. The risks associated with payments online have generally be ironed out and are generally non-issues these days
for a majority of sites. How you utilise CRM services to capture these people and then retain them (build the relationship) is something that wont disapear, and you as a business will depend upon more over time
rather than it reaching a saturation point of "just me sell the dang product".

My feeling its all about
a) maturation of a business in terms of CRM use and staff actions towards customers
b) CRM as a key business agility tool

How you mold, present, change, move relationships is the key, and CRM as as enabler is something that wont go away (the acroymn may though!).

pat may
Member

Posted 24-Oct-2003 12:30 AM
Interesting points. I feel a general confusion addressing CRM definition—is it a tool/is it a method/ e philosophy? Ultimately, the tools we know today will of course be replaced with new, smarter tools and people will get tired talkin CRM, using CRM—so I think in that perspective Carol is right. The acronym won't survive. It's already challenged a lot for example by Frederik Newell in his book Why CRM doesn't work—where he suggest we should start talking about CMR instead—empowring the customer to manage the relation.

However, when approaching CRM as a philosophy—you need to create a relation (trust etc) before any transaction (financial of nature or not) can take place—it will never die. People funny enough don't just buy products. Also, if you leave it entirely up to customers, it would imply that you follow their demand instead of creating a demand too—which would mean the end of most retail activities. If people would buy onloy what they really need or want to buy, we'd have a genuine problem. Wink We need the relation and we need to nurture it. Products are looking more and more the same, the choice in the different categories is amazing, services are lookalike too—where we can differentiate is in the relation!

Pat May
Radical Communications

steve olyha
Member

Posted 24-Oct-2003 05:55 AM
I don't belive there is, or CAN be, a saturation point for CRM. CRM is not a tool, that's the "old" CRM where it was a technology (and just an app at that). CRM is a business model and set of operating practices, it's no longer a thing like a tool. World-class CRM involves the entire enterprise being focused, in an integrated fashion, on driving profitability in customer interactions. In fact, I might argue the term CRM is becoming a limiting factor in the way companies should think about managing interactions. Practically speaking, can one really drive great customer relationships under the old front-office definitions of the functions CRM encompasses? Of course not, Supply-Chain, Finance, HR functions are ALL involved in delivering the customer experience. I'd say we're years and years away from CRM saturation, it's just evolving as it always will.

Jay Rollins
Member

Posted 24-Oct-2003 07:21 AM
What I am reading into your comment is that operational CRM can reach a point where additional process improvement within current customer interaction channels will result negligable gains in cost reduction and productivity gains. I would argue that if history has taught us anything, customers change. Their behaviors, their channel preferences, how marketers "train" them, how even systems "train" them all influence the evolution of customer interactions and the technologies/processes that support them .

We are seeing it today with email. Once, you could easily get a 4% conversion rate on an email campaign without significant segmentation. Now, you have to segment the hell out of your file and apply different communication strategies for each segment to see similar conversion rates. Now with the addition of SPAM guards provided by ISPs and the general attitude toward commercial email by consumers even this strategy is difficult to succeeed at.

In my mind, this is the natural chain of events. One of the central themes for Continuous Process Improvement is to constantly innovate. When the gains using statistical process control become negligable, you look at the entire system and core processes all over again with a fresh eye and a different perspective. Survival as a business demands it. With CRM, as one channel/method/strategy degrades, it forces innovations that create others. The dynamics of people and their preferences mandate that CRM as a strategy/pilosphy and as a set of technologies be flexible enough to facilitate change. In essence, people require change, change facilitates innovation, innovation is a basis for revolution and revolution is a necessary part of evolution.

Vishal Sarkar
Member Council
Member

Posted 28-Oct-2003 12:37 PM
"If CRM is just a tool (and if you think practically),it will show that the ultimate aim of the customer is to buy a product, whether the organization adopts CRM or not, it will hardly matter to him/her. "

I think that is a very short-sighted observation.

There are two immediate clarities needed here -

Vishal