|
Marketers Out Of Touch With Customers
By Christopher Carfi
Expert Author
Article Date: 2006-05-05
On the heels of the previous post, which has some saying "CRM is dead," comes a very interesting article by Barney Beal.
Here are some points of note from the article, quoting a recent study from the CMO council. (All stats below were sourced from Barney's excellent report.) According to the study:- Two thirds of respondents said they have no formal system for tracking marketing's role in acquiring new customers
- Over one third don't have a model of their "best" customer or opportunity
- Just under a third have no reliable data on profitability of key customers
- Nearly 50% said someone other than marketers influences the "segmentation and targeting strategy"*
Now, those points noted, there is a huge reliance on existing "CRM" systems. This, however, is frought with some problems. 33% of the respondents cited their CRM systems as their primary information source. Yet the survey found that "40% of the respondents rated their customer data systems as 'weak' or 'very weak' in timeliness and depth; availability of useful data; reports and analytics; and relevance to marketing strategies."
The whole article is here.
* - N.B. I still despise the terms "segmentation" and "targeting" in this context. The first to me seems like it refers to tearing the customer limb from limb. The second seems to indicate a viewpoint that the customer is prey that is to be stalked and bagged like a trophy elk. But I digress.
Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web
Technorati: CRM
About the Author:
Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customer´s point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.
|
|
