Posts from — June 2008

When travelling, ‘local’ breakfast television makes an educative ’screen saver’ for the morning routine. Pictures, and presentation style speak volumes, even if the language is incomprehensible: a black cloud ‘avec’ rain drop, means a soaking in any tongue.

So, on a recent trip to Ljubjana it was enlightening to watch Slovenian television showcase business leaders on its breakfast programme; it even appeared to give their salary, although I’m not entirely sure about that. The tenor of the pieces are obviously meant to inspire, giving career path, and an ‘ideal day’. Not quite ‘Hello Magazine’ style, but it could easily be given a gloss.

Apart from celebrity business people such as Richard Branson, Simon Woodroffe and Alan Sugar, when did I last see a ‘normal’ business hero outside the business pages of newspapers and journals in the UK? When did you?

Slovenia is a new country rising from the ashes of communist Yugoslavia; which itself was wrested out of the fatally tangled Habsburg Empire. Except for a short time under Napoleon, the Slovenes don’t seem to have had very much independence in the last 1000 years. Now, with around 2million people, the Euro, and EU development funding, they are seeking a purpose with competitive advantage and ‘feeling’.

Making business rather than ‘Pop Idol’ an aspiration for people seems a shrewd move. And there is evidence aplenty to show that distinctive business success based on a personal social responsibility is Slovenia’s zeitgeist. “Forward with nature” is their united mission covering everything from pre-fabricated motorway architecture, to ecological housing construction and a hospitality industry built around ‘wellness’ and ’slow-food’.

But I would say they still have one cultural disadvantage to overcome from their communist past - customer service. Real, honest, altruistic customer service woven into their shiny, new, green, designer businesses could well be a world beater for brand Slovenia.

Back in 1999 CRM equalled call centre: wall to wall stands at every CRM exhibition exuded the relationship benefits of the channel. But, in reality call centres have not equalled better relationships and dealing with modern ‘contact centres’ is high on the list of stressful experiences. Many customers would prefer efficient self service to talking to a run of the mill call centre agent.

At CallNorthWest’s directors debate on ‘Automation and Strategic Planning for the Future’ recently, Director Tim Kirby reminded the call centre industry that hearing your child was going to be a city trader would be wonderful news, whereas being told they were going to work in a call centre would be disheartening, to say the least. Yet in both roles they would spend all day wearing headphones to engage with people on the telephone in order to build up assets.

As companies return from India a little wiser, how to lift the image of the industry in the UK is taxing minds. On the expert panel with me at the event were Directors from Vertex, O2, arvato services, and Dimension Data. In the audience senior managers from SME’s, international companies and government pooled ideas - even a Government minister has promised an appearance at the next event!

Distilling all the thoughts the answer to this question is not easy and has several strands:-

• Beak the habit of micro management and spending excessive amounts of time reporting facts irrelevant to good service such as wrap up time and calls per agent; call answering is a poor proxy for customer service. Analytics are needed but should reflect customer outcome priorities, not transaction costs.
• Promote your strategic value. How does what you do meet company goals other than cost reduction? Where do you engage customers over the ‘customer journey’? For example, are you key to the renewal of service contracts. Do you detect customer attrition, or warm customers for cross-sales? If you don’t know your value how will others?
• Where is the future for customer contact in your organization? The call centre of today will not be around in 10 years time, and the changes will be driven by technology - real-time marketing, social software, virtualisation. Do you have a pilot team in place with IT and customer experts to experiment you way into the future of conversational marketing?

Paper on the past and future of call centres - Your call is important to us - prove it!

If you are in the IT market, software, hardware, or service provider, then word of mouth is hugely important to getting that invitation to go and talk to prospective clients. As well as using the internet to research options, companies also use their peers, and analysts as a source of recommendation. Good relationships with analyst companies such as Gartner, Forrester and Ovum are as valuable to IT organizations as sales to customers; they will help shape your strategic marketing, R&D and go to market plan. But too many companies see an analyst briefing in the same vein as a media interview - and make the mistake of using the same techniques.

When doing an analyst briefing here are some key points to remember:-

• Choose the key analysts in your field who influence the markets you want to reach. This is not necessarily the top analysts at the top firms. Grade them into gold and silver relationships - gold are close strategic relationships, silver are ‘good terms’ relationships.

• Understand the analyst’s field of interest and their research agenda. The more you can help them with their research, the deeper will be your engagement with them. When you talk about what your technology/service does, give case studies and stories about your implementations.

• Bear in mind that an analyst is looking for knowledge, a supportive network, and fame in their sphere of influence. If you can help them, they will help you. Your briefing is a dialogue, not a dump of your brochure and sales presentations. Send those out beforehand as background material.

• In a good analyst relationship there will always be some give and take by way of reciprocal information; and even in a fledgling relationship you will glean a lot about the market direction by listening carefully to the questions. Analysts will trial out market hypothesis on you. It is these ’stalking horses’ that shape markets. If your strategy is in line, it will be better for you.

• A journalist is looking for a ‘700 word story’ for the next deadline. An analyst is looking to write a report that will shape markets and have some longevity, plus have the information to offer clients best advice on who should be on their shortlist.

Analysts like to have good relationships with experts in companies; working together will move markets. To help companies develop their analyst briefing skills we have been asked by clients to develop a coaching service. We are now delighted to say we are now ‘open for business’.

“CRM is not about technology” was the popular mantra of 2000: so it is ironic that in 2008 CRM means ‘customer relationship management supported by technology’. Even Forrester has redefined it this way. However, to view CRM as secondary to customer relationship strategy – as some business managers do - is to be blind to the opportunities for innovation and value creation spilling out of the heads of IT professionals. For there, flows a wealth of ideas to realize the vision of sales through service, differentiating customer experience and conversational marketing.

With the escalating pace of IT change, and investment in CRM technology (licences and maintenance) set to reach $11bn by 2011 it is now a pre-requisite for strategic marketing managers to be IT literate and work in collaboration with IT colleagues to spot opportunity, innovate and set relevant business change in motion. Fortunately, new software delivery models such as open source and software as a service (SaaS) enable this transformation by increasing access to IT and lowering the cost of experimentation.

So here are some key technologies to look out for. Many are at long last able to meet the CRM vision we have had for so long; others promise to remove the ‘Berlin Wall’ between IT and business; some will revolutionise industries.

Enhancing the customer value proposition

• Real-time decision support (aka next best action)
• Social productivity platforms
• Mobile and location based services
• Mashups

Augmenting people - your most valuable asset

• Enterprise 2.0
• Voice recognition

Generating the adaptive business

• Model driven CRM applications
• Cloud computing

Behind the scenes

• Information security
• Service orientated application or architecture (SOA
• Bandwidth and memory storage
• Virtualisation

For more detail see “New Technologies every marketing manager should know about”.