09.04.03
 By Ginger
Conlon
There is a need for more marketing accountability and precision; companies should
look at ROI across the enterprise, for example, CRM and supply chain together;
and total customer value should include each customer's current value, their future
value, and associated value.
The CRM industry has been hotter than an August day in Arizona, and the recent
DCI CRM Conference & Expo was overflowing with industry buzz. From the standing-room-only
demos at the Microsoft CRM booth to the banter at the panel on trends in mid-market
CRM, the show offered a plethora of news, advice, and trends.
Addressing a packed house, Phillip Kotler, Ph.D., professor of international
marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, began
his keynote by declaring that there is a need for more marketing accountability
and precision. "Marketers have been negligent by not being financial,"
he said. He suggested that companies appoint someone from accounting to be a "marketing
comptroller," responsible for reviewing marketing budgets and expenses.
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With today's strategies and technology tools, he added, there is no reason to
accept the abysmal direct mail response rates and new-product failure rates of
the past. "We need to move to targeting the right customer at the right time
with the right message and the right offer," he said.
By taking this approach companies can maximize customer relationships, Kotler
said. He advised attendees to use what he has dubbed precision marketing: "building
a customer-centric organization and aligning hardware, software, and analytics
to run the marketing process."
"If your company is not customer-centric, you'll lose to the companies
that are," he warned.
Speaker Mark Ambrose, chief architect of CitiCards, discussed understanding
customers and customer value as a way to achieve customer centricity. "You
need to understand the perception of the individual," he said. "The
difference between value-added and intrusive is the customer's, not the company's."
Companies also need to understand total customer value, he said. Total customer
value should include each customer's current value; their future value, including
a decline in value if they're in a segment that has a propensity to leave; and
associated value, such as whether their family members are also customers. "Total
customer value is at the heart of CRM," Ambrose said. "The promise of
CRM is to help keep the balance between business value and customer value."
To deliver better value to its customers and to break down the silos between such
systems as sales and billing, Cable & Wireless implemented Siebel Systems,
said Kunal Malik, director, business systems. "The delay between systems
is time, money, and customer satisfaction," Malik said. "These systems
are now integrated through Siebel, and the entire organization can now see all
the data." This allows Cable & Wireless to have one company-wide, quote-to-case
process, he said. What's more, Malik said, such tools as decision trees and business
rules allow for less training time and more selling time. This is also the case
in the Cable & Wireless call center, where a Siebel/CTI implementation provides
screen pops to agents that give them the ability to spend less time on finding
out who the customer is, and more time solving their problem. These benefits,
and the cost savings of maintaining only one CRM system, has delivered "excellent
ROI," Malik said.
Return on investment was of course a recurring theme throughout the conference,
including a keynote panel discussion on the mid-market. Speakers Robb Eklund,
vice president of CRM product marketing for Oracle, Bill Parsons, vice president
of CRM sales for PeopleSoft, Zach Nelson, CEO of NetLedger, and Mike Doyle, chairman
and CEO of Salesnet, agreed that success in the form of ROI means different things
to every company. But there are common ways to get ROI, they said. While Nelson
suggested looking for ease-of-implementation and starting with a controlled pilot,
Doyle advised attendees to work equally toward achieving costs savings and revenue
growth. Parsons added that to get a full picture of ROI, companies should look
at it across the enterprise, for example, CRM and supply chain together. "You
can generate ROI from any part of a CRM solution," he said. "It all
goes back to internal discovery."
Eklund added that to get ROI, "decide what you need before you talk to
vendors." And be sure to "hold those vendors accountable for your success,"
Parsons added.
Referring to the old story that the Boston road system is so bad because there
was no planning (the city just paved the cow paths to make roads), Nelson said,
"Don't just pave the cow paths. Look at what is the ideal process and then
automate that process."
Originally published at destinationCRM.com
About the Author:
Ginger Conlon is editor-in-chief of CRM magazine and destinationCRM.com. Contact
her at gconlon@destinationCRM.com
Read this newsletter at: http://www.crmnewz.com/2003/0904.html |
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