The World is Upside Down

This blog spends a lot of pixels on the topic of CRM (Customer Relationship Management).  How can companies manage their customers.  How can we keep current customers loyal and retain them?  How can we find new customers who will be profitable and love us and stay with us?

Simple answer?

You can’t.

You don’t really manage customers anymore — if you ever did.  Perhaps the idea was always unreasonable.

Customers are people.  Newsflash.

People are unpredictable.  People are not, by nature, loyal.  If they were the divorce rate wouldn’t be at 50%.

People only care about what they care about NOW.  Today.  If you are selling Christmas trees to Jews they won’t care.  They don’t use them (well, some do but not many).

Customers buy what they WANT to buy and the key today is not in trying to manage your customers but in understanding who they are, what they want (or need) and making it easy for them to be in the right place at the right time with the right story.    Story is key here — because customers need to be able to find what they need when they need it.

And it needs to be simple.  Simple for customers to understand what your widget is.  Easy for them to understand why it matters to THEM (not you, they could care less about you) and then make it easy for them to get to the end result of what they want.   Intuitive (like a iPod, like a GUI (graphical user interface) versus a c: prompt).

The customer is now in charge of the world.  Realize it.  Embrace it.  So now more than ever is “know thy customer” and realize that while you need them, they don’t need you.  Unless you give them a reason to need you.

Internet Marketing — at home at work and on your cell phone

July 2007 McKinsey published a report on how companies are marketing online.

The results are intriguing.

Although most savvy companies are using some form of online marketing (about 2/3rd per the report) online and offline marketing are often separate and non-communicative. Doesn’t that seem odd in light of the whole “clicks and mortar” concept of combining the power of the internet with good old fashioned outlets?

A major reason for the disconnect is the old “silos of information” problem we’re so familiar with. The systems that run traditional businesses don’t have the necessary capabilities for Wiki, Blogs, viral marketing, etc. Even with today’s sophisticated CRM software solutions that allow a prospective customer entry via the Internet, “click to chat”, call center, email, fax, etc. most companies haven’t implemented that technology — let alone the next step that ties the Internet itself to their back end ERP or industry specific applications (such as HIS in health-care, BSS in Telecom, etc.).

So many companies have sophisticated “front end” marketing for their Internet presence — SMS coupons to the cell phone for example — but the back end is a little chaotic and highly manual.

Today when most people think of Internet marketing (if they think of it at all) they picture email SPAM and banner adds that may be linked to previous sites they’ve visited.

Thought leaders have long been blogging (hey, you’re one of them — you are reading this!) and using SEO (search engine optimization) to try and get their websites higher up on the coveted search engines like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search, etc.

We’ve moved from purely informational websites and B2C or B2B (business to consumer and business to business) to massively multi-player game sites (like World of Warcraft or Disney’s ToonTown) and social networks (like FaceBook and MySpace).

Virtual worlds are the next phase past social networks. The are multi-dimensional sites where users can interact with each other in a cross between IM (instant messaging) and social networking.

Podcasts and ad hoc Webinars are another new marketing venue where the information is multimedia and folks can watch them online or download them. These can take the form of demos and infomercials and can be a very effective form of online advertising.

We’ve barely scratched the surface — how about Wikis (like Wikipedia where anyone can contribute content) or Widgets (if you have Vista you probably have widgets showing the time or the stock market) and web services that do the work of making it all seem like magic. . .

Everyone seems to agree that online marketing is important and here to stay. 83% (per the McKinsey report) are using it for service management and 44% for pricing. The real trick here is to decide which form of online marketing makes the most sense for your company. To do that you must decide what your goal is (driving sales, improved customer satisfaction, leads, etc.) and then examining not only the various forms we’ve discussed here but which best suits your business model.