Skip to main content

Do you know your customers?

CRM is probably one of the most risky business strategies evolved in the modern times. True, many customers would want to buy things from you, if they feel comfortable with your brand, but also true that most of the value the customer gets to you is when he purchases the product and not exactly the customer relation. Will you care about a customer if he really has no chance of buying a product from you?

An 80 year old man walks into the clothes store looking for a good tie for his (probably) last high-school reunion. Helping it out will lose your brownie points for any up-selling opportunity, but might as well score well in the humanitarian department. What would you prefer?

The most important malfunction of a CRM system is removal of the human touch from the whole system. We all detest system, we are born into one and have no choice but to choose and all humans avoid the system since then. You have a billion dollars and you set up a great call center, with a SLA of less than 5 hours, quite impressive, but what happens to your customer has another issue with your service? True your customer service agent will get all the case history along with it, but will he also get the sentiment out of the system?

CRM was one of the early strategies of free world, the local shop keeper knew my name, my school name, the class in which I studied as well as which pencil I use in school (he used to give it to me), now knowing all this was really cute, but if the pizza place knows that I was recently divorced because I know only order plain non-veg pizza without extra cheese in a different address, it is totally and exceptionally creepy.

So if you are implementing a CRM, do you know your customers?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The unofficial guide to become a Certified Salesforce Administrator (ADM 201)

In my attempt at maximum certifications in 60 days, I completed Salesforce Certified Administrator exam on February 11th 2013 So you have decided to ramp up your career and take certifications in your hand. Good choice. It is also likely that this is the first time you have heard of Salesforce, certification and since your company has a vision of you completing the certification you have decided to do it. At this stage it is likely that, You have done extensive googling. You have received countless brain-dumps. And you have received plenty of advise from different types of users which ranges from Admin certification is easier than making coffee to Admin certification is tougher than building a rocket-ship to fly off to the moon. The purpose of this guide is to give you a clear understanding of what to expect when you are expected to become Certified Salesforce Administrator. To bring sense to all the things you have seen so far and to clearly explain w...

Some PDF tricks on Visualforce: Landscape, A4, page number and more

The beauty of Visualforce is simplicity. Remember the shock you received when you were told the entire page renders as PDF if you just add renderAs=PDF to the Page tag. For those who thought I spoke alien language right now, here is the trick, to render a page as PDF, we add a simple attribute to the <apex: page> tag <apex: page renderAs='pdf'> This will render the entire page as PDF. Now, say we need to add some extra features to the PDF. Like a page number in the footer or we need to render the page in landscape mode. Faced with this problem, I put on my Indiana Jones hat and went hunting for it in the vast hay-sack of the internet (read: googled extensively). Imagine my happiness when i found a big big page with many big big examples to solve the problem. The document I am referring to is from W3C, paged Box media . Long story short, I now possess the ultimate secret of rendering the page in any format I want. So here are few tricks I learned...

What Toilet-Training my toddler Taught Me about change management

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and I had just finished a grueling design authority session when I smelled something foul. My poker-trained eyes spotted a tell on my toddler's face: He was about to soil his pants. I then ran behind my toddler, begging him to use the toilet. Trying various methods of persuasion, I begged him to use the toilet. This scene was familiar in our house ever since my partner and I began training him to use the toilet. He giggled, darting around like it was a game of tag. As I finally caught up to him and we triumphantly reached the bathroom, I realized this chaotic scene had uncanny parallels to change management in the workplace. It's not the act in itself but the various persuasion techniques and changing behavior embedded in my toddler's whole life. Here are some of the lessons my toddler taught me in change management. Change Takes Time Just as toddlers need time to adjust to potty use, employees and team members need time to adapt to changes. ...