Welcome to the Listening Post!

Woven through the presentations I’ve seen this morning at the Gartner North American CRM Summit is an emphasis on the Gartner trichotomy of CRM into operational CRM, analytical CRM and social CRM. In the morning keynote, Gartner analyst Michael Maoz said that Gartner is seeing spending shift from operational CRM to analytical and social CRM.

 

Maoz reported the following ballpark estimates for the growth between the segments:

	Spending	Growth
Operational CRM	60%	10%
Analytical CRM	30%	30%
Social CRM	10%	60%

 

Underlying the importance of the social aspect, Maoz said “Networks matter more to your success than any other initiative.” He emphasized that social technologies now (externally to vendors!) provide consumers more information than those same vendors have internally. He gave two examples to illustrate this: 

1. He went to the web site of his refrigerator maker to buy a filter, where it treated his search “refrigerator [model #] filter” as an “any keyword” search, giving him dozens of untargeted links, before he was finally able to find the single fridge filter they sold. He decided not to buy it, then went to Google, found three filters on Amazon rather than the one, read user-submitted reviews, found a link to a crowdsourced Howcast video on how to install one of the filters, then went back to Amazon and purchased it. Superior service from the social Web!
2. Calling Toyota for a problem with his RAV4. Yes, they had CRM and instantly knew him, knew his car and knew its warranty-replacement history. Unfortunately, the customer service representative didn’t have access to any of the three articles in the New York Times and elsewhere (which included references to internal Toyota engineering documents) that had led Maoz to the conclusion his car qualified for additional warranty work.

Jim Davies, in the “Role of Technology in Improving the Customer Experience”, returned to the CRM trichotomy, using it for a taxonomy of CE initiatives:

 

	Before Experience	During the Experience	After the Experience
Operational CRM	Campaign Management	Knowledge Management	Survey
Analytical CRM	Propensity Mode	Real Time Next Best Action	Speech Analytics
Social CRM	Forum	Customer Self-Service	Media Monitoring

 

Vendors have too often taken an “after the experience” operational view of Customer Experience, and need to broaden the initiatives they are considering deeper into the analytical and social spheres.

 

Good stuff, and I look forward to more insights to come.