Month: March 2016

CRM applications used by the frontline have been around for around 20-30 years. My first consulting job was designing a CRM portal for wealth management advisors distributed around the country. Technically, it was web based and was a bit of a reach at the time but it was highly innovate and essentially had all the moving parts you see in CRM applications today. Over time, I went on to design and launch many more CRM applications covering a broad range of areas some of which won awards or were highly placed. CRM apps cover a wide range of touchpoints usages and my focus here are those CRM apps used by the frontline when the engage with the customer.

The world of CRM apps has not changed much. Today’s CRM apps are slicker, more integrated an easier to be program. But overall, they still fundamentally are hard to use, hard to enforce a process with and generally try to force you to enter in structured data all for the explicit purpose of using that data an the backend side.

In other words, the way you interact or want to interact with a customer–a fluid dance of conversations and touchpoints–comes to a jarring halt when you have to type your customer “data” into a relatively fixed, confining CRM application on your screen. Even the marketing automation space has learned that it screwed up as it realized that email campaigns have become old school and the nuances of social media marketing and messaging are the new black. After all, a growing majority of people today use email less than the previous generation, significantly less.

What is the future?

The future is not narrow list of checkboxes, pick lists, small text boxes or small fields to capture one specific concept, like the first name.

Instead the future is fluid and free flowing, much like many of the newer collaboration tools just now gaining prominence in small companies and now larger companies. It’s more about “notes” and small snippets of information versus structured screens. It’s more about searching different locations for data about customers and not requiring that all information be managed in a single tool. It’s about automating the interactions so that the right information is available to personalize a touchpoint.

Evidence for this model abound:

• CRM applications now have “chatter” or “posts” that capture a stream of unstructured notes and objects like pictures or audio clips.
• Applications like “slack” show that collaboration and documentation is easier when it’s fluid, in context and completely searchable. Trello is the same way.
• Many CRM applications capture only a few structured fields and most of the complexity is really around trying to capture additional customer information–which is where the application start becoming unwieldy.
• Most CRM software tries to tie together a 360 degree view of the customer using various ad-hoc methods of integrating with other applications.  They shoehorn that “app’s” data into the CRM application to get a 360 degree view of a customer. These integration costs are often the largest costs in a CRM project.
• CRM has started to rely on data mining and machine learning algorithms to help the advisor/rep become more productive about how to spend their time at the same time they personalize communication to the customer.
• CRM automation is increasing as bots and other automation techniques become more prevalent…for some products and channels, customers prefer automation.

Now CRM is more than just capturing information about customers, it’s also about servicing them and using information, again in context, to order their products, resolve their issues or try to understand their behavior. Getting information from other applications into the context “flow” has proven to be very tricky.

It’s true that some data, like an order, is highly structured and needs to be in sequence properly to support the supply chain, that’s fair. But a lot of CRM data does not need the same amount of structure. When interacting with a company’s rep or a automated systems, the needs are much different. CRM apps do need to digest data of different media types and tell you what’s important. Or, at the very least, sort through the data and summarize it for you.

In other words, the future of CRM is really more like an instant messaging program like Slack or a free-form note taking application OneNote or collaborative management tool like Trello then an application framework like popular CRM platforms today. Think tweets and hashtags and AI driving data record enrichment.

It’s not about checkboxes anymore. Sales people do not really like check checkboxes. Text mining, or unstructured analysis–whatever you want to call it–is mature enough to sort through the data and fined postal addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and linkage information to connect all the dots and prepare the data for analytical use. Network analysis is mature enough to create a graph of contacts, with context, from your email and notes. This crystal ball thinking is true for both B2C and B2B although B2B has regulatory issues that suggest that it does require some additional “structure.” In fact, these techniques are in play in extremely advanced CRM scenarios such as Know Your Customer in the AML/BSA space.

A lot of what passes today for CRM software is just a jumble of straight jackets that are unneeded and run counter to how people communicate, create information and collaborate today.

There were two articles this week/month on social media advertising that did not seem to overlap per se but are related.

The first is in HBR, March 2016 issue titled “Branding in the Age of Social Media.” (here) This article suggests that companies have spent billions on trying to build out their brands using social media but most of the money and effort has been a waste. The basic idea idea is that branded content and sponsorships in the past used to work because there were limited channels of distribution for the content and therefore most consumers had limited choices and had to watch what was shoved into those channels.

Today, it’s a bit different. The mulitude of channels means that consumers can filter out ads, shape their own customized content flows and create their own flow of entertainment content–much of it created by their friends. Rather suddenly, brands no longer could command the audience. The article mentions that most heavily branded companies such as Coca-Cola command less viewership than two guys sitting on a couch narrating video games (“e-sports”). Now, brand must fit into the flow of either “amplified subcultures” (groups of people with more narrow interests) or “art worlds” where new creative breakthroughs occur. Either way, you have to fit in via cultural branding where you align the brand around the culture of people in those two areas. So the brand can be there but only in the context of say, for example, the subculture of people who do not like smelly socks that come from running 10 miles a day. You have to create a story about smelly socks and positioning your laundry detergent as part of addressing the smelly socks problem (I made up the smelly socks example).

You essentially align the product/brand around a more specific theme that resonates with the target audience. Because the specific themes are more narrow, the amount of creative customization increases.

This is not a new concept. The article is really just saying that you have to create content about your brand/product that aligns with you target audience and is delivered to them through the “channels” that they watch.

I was also scanning Bloomberg Businessweek and their article “If You Don’t Know It By Now You’ll Never Make Millions on Snapchat.” (here) It described the “snapchat” phenomena, with its rapid rise, as well the challenge many similar companies have on maintaining their user volumes. The biggest issue is that they need to generate revenue and Snapchat is considered “expensive” advertising with little insights into “returns.”  One of the strategies Snapchat has taken is to focus their sales time on helping customers create stories to fit into their Discover channels and Snapchat’s model of perishable content. Still, a slightly talented musician posting just his daily musings and activities garners more views than all the biggest networks combined, daily. Ouch!

But it is just another lesson in what we already knew.  Find the audience you want to reach, find out where their eyes are especially now that they more choices about how and where they engage, tailor your content with a message and delivery that will engage them to watch, take action or whatever. Segment, segment, segment…

That’s about it. So yes, branding (and really just general advertising) has changed. It has to be more clever/entertaining, more thoughful and more tailored to a smaller group. You cannot rely on a famous name to push your product alone and you cannot count on blanket reach to communicate.

So there is not really a lot of new news here, just a recognition that we as companies and marketers have to be more clever because the easy ways no longer work and it’s possible to get a huge ramp (given the viewing numbers) if we put that cleverness to work.

Perhaps the real news is that some people in their current jobs need to become more clever quickly or find some clever people to help them with their branding/marketing. What is wonderful at least to me, is that the volumes of eyeballs in some of these channels makes them worth paying attention to.

Got it.

Check.

Roll credits.