The Yankee Group on Revitalizing CRM Strategy

During a recent presentation on using customer-centric CRM for improved business performance, The Yankee Group CRM Program Manager Sheryl Kingstone discussed methods for building customer lifetime value and developing the right internal structure to share customer strategy and evaluate the true health and success of customer relationships. "We are succeeding, and there is effectiveness to sales automation and business intelligence," Kingstone said. "But there's a lot of negativeness around CRM, which is very frustrating, because if you ask [executives] what they're trying to do with their customer base, it's all really about being customer-centric. "The shortcoming of CRM was that there is too much M [management]. It was all very management-level, it didn't go out to the employee, and the relationship was very limited, it didn't provide in-context information that would enhance the relationship." Kingstone discussed the importance of using enterprisewide analytics to bring the cross-discipline insight needed to successfully execute integrated sales, service, and marketing plans. "If you don't have integrated insight, you can't answer the question of which processes [lead to] the most profitable customer." In a year when some CRM providers have become Wall Street darlings, why is there any concern about the state of CRM? "The enterprises themselves are still doing [CRM] very siloed...so we've had less failures, but there is still disillusionment, because they haven't been able to optimize customer interaction at the point of contact," Kingstone told CRM magazine. True change to customer-centric thinking can only come about when businesses are willing to structure their KPIs around success with the customer lifecycle, not individual departmental metrics which may ultimately come into conflict."[Companies] are still looking at KPIs by individual silos, and sometimes even the individual silos aren't measuring the right KPIs," she said. "A sales-driven organization [may] just be looking at revenue per salesperson or ramp-up time, but do they look at the average number of calls to close a deal or the presentations per proposal? There may be some best practices, and that information needs to be fed back to marketing." Related articles: Walking the Customer Centric Walk It's All About the Customer Experience