There's a new wave of technology hitting the customer service sector. From blogs, to forums, chat, instant messaging, and email, keeping in touch and helping our customers is much easier than it was ten years ago. There are so many tools to communicate. And with the younger generation learning about this technology at a young age, it will be hard for companies not to adopt these modes of communication. I believe it's vital to the survival of any company.
And so I'll end with the words of Jim Berkowitz at CRM Mastery, Inc in relation to this:
"... a good starting point for examining your existing capabilities and assessing potential roles for various collaboration tools going forward. It’s also a good way to start down the path of creating a robust strategy for putting the customer back in C-R-M, a business goal everyone should share."
It's interesting as I read Jim's blog to remember that IT service and product companies have filed their lowest customer satisfaction ratings to date. During the Christmas boom of 2005 online commerce hit its lowest customer satisfaction rating to date as well.
In the b2b sectors 80+ of all IT integrated projects continue to fail in meeting the customer expected goals and performance. Some 48% of these projects fail altogether and are either dropped or replaced.
I stopped reading Jim's blog some time ago because his supper up beat all is roses in IT is part of the reason the above numbers exist. Instead of helping find a solution and telling the real story he hides the weaknesses of the IT wonder machine and perpetuates pushing false ideology and hope.
The so called collaborative technologies he talks about are far from robust and are far from being developed enough to be of use to mainstream large and small business. Not all is what it seems I'm afraid.
Since Jim is in the position that he is, his understanding of what CRM is and should be is somewhat shallow and confused as is the industry he represents. His version of CRM has nothing to do with the way businesses actually view customer relationships, the customer experience or their management.
In fact the CRM industry has been a big disapointment to busness and has never lived up to its hype. It has cost business billions of dollars in unrecoverable ROI. CRM was originally tauted by the IT industry as a save all for business and its theoritical structure never has been developed and never willas it exist today.
Posted by: Tim Whelan | April 22, 2006 7:24 AM | Permalink to Comment