Having come through the ranks of CRM activities before becoming 'more enlightened', I wanted to compare and contrast the difference in thinking between the disciplines of CRM and Experience Design. As a caveat, I still firmly believe that the fundamentals of CRM are sound -- the problem is in the way it has been spun by so many vendors and blindly adopted by too many people who are in over their heads in their job roles.

With due respect and gratitude for the level of effort it takes to put together an event, the comparison has been framed around a replayable webinar "5 Keys to Customer-Driven Marketing". Also, there are many sound principles introduced here, and should these principles help influence anyone to 'better' thinking, this is to be celebrated. The intent here is to point out, as is an element of their presentation, the gaps which leave significant opportunity untapped. It isn't that CRM (customer relationship marketing) is wrong in any way; it's that it is only a piece of the overall puzzle. The concern is that too many companies are not connecting the pieces of the puzzle.

There is a fundamental 'flaw' that comes up repeatedly in most CRM initiatives or even in CRM principles: they forget more than they remember. Case in point, one classic CRM initiative (pre-CRM evolution) was MCI's Friends & Family. Through this program MCI rapidly gained large segments of the long-distance market. But there was a problem: The standard telecom business model could not sustain a customer focus. All data was keyed against a BTN: billing telephone number. That is, to the business model, the center of the universe -- the thing to which everything else was tied -- was the billing telephone number. It's all well and fine to willingly accept from customers information about the people they want to maintain relationships with, but if the first time they change phone numbers (ala. "move") all of this information is lost, what value have you provided to the customer?

Worse, the relationships were valuable information to MCI, but there was other valuable information that customers often shared on customer service calls, but the agents had no means by which to capture all of this 'free' data. Instead, MCI spent millions each year on data from which they would 'extrapolate' what people wanted and/or might desire.

Unfortunately, this is the primary focus of most CRM initiatives -- trying to predict what people might do, with less attention paid to what they're already doing. The "5 Keys to Customer-Driven Marketing" presentations attempts to rectify some of this, but here again, it's the 'marketing' term that musses up the intent. The principles of marketing as a discipline have come to rely on certain mechanisms for insight: surveys are one of them. While surveys can be useful, they are but one piece of a huge puzzle. The focus of this webinar relies on surveys as a primary input mechanism.

1. To Know What Customer's Think -- Ask Them
Notable quote: "We want to do more listening than talking."
My retort: If you really wanted to listen, as was the case with MCI, you'd be looking at the touchpoints where people are already telling you plenty, but you're not capturing any of it.

Building upon Peter Senge's principles of continuous learning, and the fundamentals of optimizing life models through feedback loops the goal is to engage in continuous listening. One company which readily embraces this term, iPerceptions, indeed engages in a similar business venture as does the sponsor of the webinar. They are a sharp group of people. But their product approach fails to embrace one critical truth: what people say and what people do are often not congruent. The data gathered from these listening mechanisms has limited value until it is mapped against actual behaviors. [Interestingly, Stanford University has a new field of study related to influencing behaviors called Captology.]

Lastly, people answer questions within a specific context. Too often, these answers are extrapolated to other contexts for which they may or may not apply. Without additional measures to ensure the 'transferability' of certain data to other contexts, questionable decisions will be made.

The true value of such data is to help identify what might need deeper research, which then leads to their second point...

2. Make Customer Feedback Actionable
Notable Quote: "Understand the 'why'"
It would fascinate me to see the measurable negative contribution made by surveys to the GNP because of the time wasted by all parties involved (the designers, the implementers, the analysts and the consumers themselves) because the questions asked are either a) not actionable or b) never acted on.

Surveys cannot answer 'why'. A 'why' is deeply imbedded both in intent and a myriad of variables that play into the economics of decisions. What is disturbing is how many well-heeled companies spend millions on meaningless data or who ignore (take no action) on the most telling data (because either no one is listening or someone is 'hiding' the tell-tale evidence of poor performance).

3. Understand the Gap Between Importance and Performance
Gap analysis is recommended along 4 continuums: Customer Service, Product Quality, Salesperson's Knowledge, Timely Delivery.

Study each of these labels very carefully. Which of them are in the language of the customer? Would any of them directly hold the answer to 'why'?

I consider such measure important in the same way that you might check a person's blood pressure. The attribute "high" blood pressure is a relative measure based on certain norms. There are conditions in which those norms may be irrelevant. Each company has to use this data to determine what their own 'norm' is. They also have to determine what the elasticity of their norms are. Does attempting to make small changes in a gap, throw the results to another extreme that are more deleterious?

Such measures are only relevant in trends over time: rates of change. And they are single data points that will prove to have specific correlations to any variety of other valuable variables. What those relationships mean will vary from business to business. They are data points which suggest other research to be conducted.

4. Make Feedback an Ongoing Activity
When you look at all the supporting activities which the presentation suggest here, there is a huge correlation made between "Feedback" and "Survey" as if they were one in the same. A survey is a week feedback mechanism, at best: it is neither timely nor contextual.

It is at this point in the presentation that it is suggested that 'trends' are important in data gathering. It is difficult to gain any significant value from 'trends' of questionable data.

5. Incorporate Feedback Back into the Business
Notable Quote: "...it is about getting the information and creating a continuous learning environment."
This is the point at which CRM and Experience Design take the biggest divergence. To successfully draw conclusions from the feedback and to determine which actions to take from the feedback require principles of design. There are no inherent principles of design embodied in CRM disciplines.

Additionally, I have found that when I've looked at the same data as others in a marketing role, we will focus on different points of 'relevance'. Their first instincts will often lead them down a path that is neither substantiated or truly relevant to the customer.

Lastly, in none of this does it suggest that specific new activities are needed or resources that might be 'differently' trained or have a different perspective than their existing resources -- even if it were just to bring in a resource to help reframe the current way of thinking, for a brief period of time.

Case Study: Golden Key International Honour Society
The second part of the webinar is a case study of a non-profit. It is a great example of how good things can come from limited models. They are doing a lot of the right activities in spite of the limitations of above-noted models.

Notable Quote: "As a new Chief Operating Officer...I asked to see the last survey...what was done with it?...nothing...what did it cost?...somewhere in the neighborhood of $20K...I thought...what a waste."

To which I thought: Why by repeating the same action would different results be expected? Certainly, there were a lot of improvements made -- there are a lot of improvement opportunities. But as people get better at all of this, the opportunity gaps will diminish. Value will rely on design principles to be applied for true differentiation, principles which rely on a variety of data points carefully positioned to set a more-stable foundation from which to build upon.

That said, the case study did just that: apply design thinking to the problem space. It showed how surveys can best be implemented in an overall research strategy, but didn’t point out the limitations or the other efforts required. This was all clearly a situation that had potential for ‘more’ should it embody more design principles.

Closing the loop on the original premise of this piece, one critical principle is a stronger focus on 'memory'. All truly phenomenal experience models are those which either shift or embody the memory of the individual into the relationship, and do so as seamlessly and as unobtrusively as possible. One more notable term raised was “customer intimacy” – truly intimate relationships are those which have deep knowing.

P.S. LOLOLOL....at the end of the webinar there was a 3-question survey that came up. The first question asked for a rating from 1 to 5, only no context was given as to the scale for the rating (was 1 or 5 high?). Such is a classic example of why surveys are so fraught with problems and how the data from them can lead to bad decisions.