Customer Relationship | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

What CRM is and what it should be

January 25, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 3 Comments

The good thing with acronyms is that they are easy to remember. Their weakness is that it’s easy to forget their meaning. Let’s consider CRM for instance, it means “Customer relationship management”. I repeat customer relationship management.

If we have a closer look, we are forced to admit that CRM has been lead astray to become, in the best case, a sales enablement tool and in the worse case a reporting tool to provide informations to sales managers without any benefits for the salespeople who have reluctance to update the data and often both this tedious task.

Don’t blame the tools. It’s the notion of customer relationship that’s been lead astray. Tools only followed the trend.

From Social Media to Social CRM : a recent experience with airlines

January 11, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 13 Comments

I already wrote many posts about social CRM on this blog and I recently had the (unfortunate ?) opportunity to add a real life experience to my thoughts. Those who’d prefer to pass over the narative of a long story may directly go to the bottom of the page to read the conclusion.

The situation

A simple holidays week. The discovering of an airline I never took before and, on my trip back home, the experience of very bad weather conditions that made thousands of people strand in many airports.

The background

I have many topics of interest outside of enterprise 2.0. Among them are travels, airlines industry and planes. I’m following and reading some specialized blogs and twitter accounts (airlines, professionals..) as well as some people who share these passions. Some of my “friends” and “followers” are also frequent travelers, ranked “Elite +” by their favorite airline and, like me, they consider that it’s more than a means of transportaion : it’s a true passion. Discussing with these people has a real added value when I need a piece a advice about an airline, a place to go, an aircraft, an airport… better ask it to people who fly more than 60 000 miles every year. Mind you, this is also true for many other fields…but I’ll discuss that later in this post.

Of course I follow the twitter account of my “usual and favorite airline”. They use twitter to broadcast more or less the same things that can also be found on their site or their newsletter, mainly advertisement about promotions. No discussions nor “retweets” of any message coming from a third party (clients or other professionals). The account is not very active and is mainly a one-way channel, with a very weak community side.

For instance, when the “community” live tweeted the delivery of their first Airbus A380 that was broadcasted in video on the web (btw that was a great idea…) and asked some questions to the airline about the plane or wanted to know if the videos would be available for reuse on blogs…no answer, no interest. No more sign of life when I took the time to bring my personal blog back to life (I rarely have time to blog on it) to share the experience of my first flight on their A380. A position that is, a priori, neither bad or good and must be the consequence of a well-though-out strategy.

So, this is the state of my social media experience with “my” airline. Quite frustrating when you’re both an “Elite” and passionate passenger, but the community is large enough so I can share this passion even without the airline. Of course there are many opposite examples (no need to mention Southwest…), but I’m only considering my own personal experience.

So you love your customers…and you let others take care of them

November 23, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Saying that customers are businesses’ most important assets is now a common view. First because their money make the business live, second because they are its best ambassadors when they’re happy with the delivered service.

Of course, an happy customer is a customer who’s delivered a service that meets his expectations. He also gives value to the quality of the quality of the customer relationship. To some extent, some would value more an average service with a good relationship than a perfect service with poor relationship quality because they like to be listened to, to see people do their best to give them satisfaction.

Note that’s the same with prospects, either in a B2B or B2C context : the promise that are made matter, but the relationship a business can foster with its prospects matters a lot. Ditto with employees.

That’s one of the impacts of social business in the relationships between a company and its ecosystem. Either it’s about marketing, sales, support, innovation, both companies, partners, customers, employees are looking for a new form of engagements. This engagement has first to be build then harnessed.

And, of course, many are outsourcinf their customer support, their recruitment, and sometimes a part of their marketing. I’d like to know how to build a strong relationship between a business, a brand, and its ecosystem, by letting a third party act and talk on the company’s behalf.

Outsourcing sometimes mean more control on costs, get access to competences that don’t exist internally. But it also mean the loss of any chance to build something with the other. Through the marketing relationship, through customer support, people want to interact with YOU. They want to discovert who YOU are. A good relationship is a two people game, without any go between. That what helps to save a deal when things go wrong. So you’d like to let someone else initiate and manage this relationship ? Someone who’s not you, who has not your culture, for whom you’re only a customer among others ?

Community management is something serious one has to manage himself. Not an undercontracted job, or a task assigned to an intern with too much idle.

Value is created and survives through relationships. Saying so is good. But that’s not enough if behaviors go the opposite way.

You’re wondering what a customer community can be used for, what your facebook fans are worth ? No you now. Now it’s time to initiate things yourself instead of outsouring, then rely on the group to leverage

PS : Whenever you can’t understand what’s at stake, ask yourselves what would have happened you you asked a friend to replace you at your first date with your future husband/wife. Get it ?

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: Communities, community management, community manager, customer relationship, customers, engagement, support

Lessons from a crisis and the behavioral economics

August 26, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 6 Comments

A year ago, the world entered a crisis that didn’t let it unhurt. A crisis I won’t call economic or or financial since I think the disease was deeper. Anyway, many people understand that, this time, we’ll have to be more creative than in a past and not rebuild things as they were. But we still have to draw all the consequences of this crisis, even if they makes us uncomfortable, because keeping our eyses closed is the best way to face an even more critical situation in the upcoming years.

Among others, there is the failure of one core credential the economy has been built upon for decades : the rationality of economic players. What made us model everything as indicators and forecasts that could not be wrong. Clients were predictable. Employees too. The price of raw materiels, interest rates, shareholders… everything was writen. Modeled. Under control.

So we were all elements of a complexe mathematical function which was guaranteeing us endless growth and enrichment.

And everything collapsed. We knew (or should have known) that nothing is rational on earth. Easy to say. In the future we’ll have to take irrationality into account in all business and economic decisions if we don’t want the same causes to have the same effets. Of course, uncertainty can be reduced…but not removed. That’s what we used to forget.

In one word, as writen in this HBR article, businesses now have to pay more attention to their employees, customers, partners. Not only because it’s positive for business, but also because it’s the only way to avoid making huge mistakes anymore. This is about behavioral economics.

Surveys showed that the whish for rationalization, that is often embodied by an increased control, makes people cheat and is an obstacle to collaboration. They also point out (but is it a surprise) that a discontented customer looks for revenge toward the enterprise, regardless to the cause of discontent Businesses can’t afford anymore saying “it doesn’t matter” because the price to pay is immeasurably more important that the cost of a lost customer, whatever is prejudice is and even if it’s only subjective. Some could see crowdsourcing as good way to improve things : if things are not predictable, listening is a good means to lower uncertainty. In the same way, no one is sure that customers will accept a new product as predicted by surveys. Involving them in the innovation/design process can reduce uncertainty.

Cheat and revenge seems to be the consequence of not taking people and their irrational ity into account. And the price to pay is high.

One can found that depressing or demoralizing, but it’s a part of our economy from now on. According to the author, business will have to get the right capabilities to face it. It may be long and uncomfortable regarding to acquired habits. It means listening to people and an ongoing experiment system A new way to embrace marketing and customer relationships, but also employee’s motivation.

Who said that value chain and processes has to be socialized ?

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: behavioral economics, collaboration, crowdsourcing, customer relationship, customers, economy, irrationality, marketing, rationality, socialization, value chain

Balanced Scorecard, value creation, and entreprise 2.0 : anyone can help ?

March 6, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

My thought of the moments are taking me to places where my knowledge reaches its limits and where I don’t find (or not as quickly as I want) relevant informations.

So I’m submiting you my questions in bulk and anyone who can help is welcome. Really need yor help..
• Do you know the percentage of enterprises which use balanced scorecard for stragic planning ?

• Do you know if they give as much importance to all aspects of BSC ou do they focus on some of them ? And which ?

• If they don’t treat all aspects of BSC equitably, can we note differences in performance on a short, middle, long term range comparing to those who give as much importance to everything ?
• Do you know if those who conscentioulsy treat the “customer perspective” part are more likely to use web 2.0 in their customer relationship ? Conversly, if those who use web 2.0 are using BSC ?

• In the same way, I’d like to know if those who conscentiously treat the “human capital perspective” part are more likely to experiment enterprise 2.0. And if those who make such experiment are BSC driven.

Thanks in advance