Organizations have spent vast amounts of money in pursuit of the perfect CRM system, yet the full promise of CRM is rarely realized. The original premise of CRM was threefold: To understand customer behavior to improve relationships; to share this information throughout the enterprise to allow customer-facing systems and staff to be more effective; and to reduce costs. Unfortunately, most organizations still cannot present a consistent and coordinated customer experience. Instead communications often seem to conflict across channels or at best appear to compete for customer attention, resulting in a perceived dysfunction that leaves customers perplexed.
Companies that want to get it right need to take a long, hard look at what it takes to establish a CRM system that fulfills its promise. One obvious notion is to turn the old segmentation approach on its ear and, instead, rely on individual user behavior to establish better targeted campaigns that mean something to...
