Except when I’m writing about it, I don’t think a lot about customer relationship management (CRM). When I am writing about it, then having a system that quantifies all the minutiae of dealings with customers actually makes good sense. If I were a large company, I’d probably want to know, for example, that customers were dropping out of customer service call queues in record numbers or bypassing my more expensive product for the bottom of the line offering.
This type of information is precisely what a good CRM system calls out and why so many of them have been sold.
Charles Green, a contributing editor to Rain Today, is not out to demonize CRM, but he does make a great point in his article Is CRM Harmful to Your Business? And that point is (drumroll, please): CRM is much beloved by left-brained, analytical types who take great comfort in metrics. The problem is that perusing and analyzing the numbers tends to take them away from talking to customers.
Mr. Green puts this so well that I wish I’d written it myself. “If the CRM problem definition is based in data. . . there’s a good chance that the solution will also be based in data. Which means it won’t be based in activities such as visiting clients, getting on the phone, collaboratively defining problem areas, surfacing conflicts, or talking about over-runs or misaligned expectations.”
So, on the face of it, CRM isn’t harmful to a business—except when it becomes a convenient way to escape addressing the messier aspects of doing business with other human beings.
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