David Ben-Gal Kramer of The Fieldstone Hill Group recently posted these observations in the IntelligentCRM Forum about human factors, loyalty, and customer relationship management (CRM) dialogs:
Can CRM survive without focusing on human relationships?
Is it reasonable to believe that we can facilitate loyal, long-term customer relationships using only technology, and essentially ignoring the micro-level, human interaction that is the fabric of real collaboration?
The major challenges facing sales and marketing professionals today — diminished customer loyalty, accelerating change, hypercompetition, and fragmented markets and media—can no longer be reduced departmentally, addressed piecemeal, and only [addressed] at the individual level. Today’s organizational communication requirements can only be handled collectively, as seen through the shared lens of collaborative leaders and groups.
Marketers have responded to the challenge by implementing sophisticated CRM solutions, and by pursuing consumers across an increasingly fragmented media landscape with an explosion of new and somewhat intrusive marketing techniques. As a result of this technological escalation, I fear today’s consumers are adopting an increasingly cynical attitude about virtually all marketing messages.
I believe that the solution for achieving marketing effectiveness in this new consumer landscape is not limited to further technological escalation, emphasizing solely the technology of relationship management and mass customization. Collaborative systems solutions that drive today’s thriving CRM marketplace are absolutely vital. But they are no substitute for real collaboration. And in the long run, it’s not what we’re able to learn about our customers — and distribute seamlessly across the enterprise — it’s the quality of our small-scale, human interaction that will ultimately lead to long-term, loyal relationships.
So, the long-term solution, I believe, is twofold. It requires the technology to link customer-facing employees in a relationship management enterprise. But [the solution] also lies in joining with consumers in genuine, human dialog—by communicating authentically and listening appreciatively; by realigning our own value structure to collaborate with them.
Dialogic conversation is the centerpiece of this model. Dialog helps marketers understand the shared underlying assumptions and belief systems that bind us most basically in workgroups, departments, companies, markets, and communities. Researchers like Glenna Gerard and Linda Elinnor (Dialogue: Rediscover the Transforming Power of Conversation, John Wiley and Sons, 1998) believe dialog can help us embrace more of our human potential by learning how to generate qualities of collaboration and balance them with our natural urge to compete and communicate in the marketplace (Gerard and Elinnor, Dialogue, 1998).
In companies, dialogic workgroup sessions give us a vital new process and approach for working together, for making decisions, solving problems, for developing communication strategies and collateral, and maintaining long-term, loyal, customer relationships. That’s because dialog puts more emphasis on listening than speaking, more emphasis on understanding than agreeing, and more emphasis on learning than persuasion.
And, ultimately—more emphasis on collaborative behavior than on collaborative technology.
Respond to Kramer’s comments, or review his 11 Goals of Collaborative Sales and Marketing, at the IntelligentCRM Forum at IntelligentCRM.com.
Correction
In the June 26, 2000 issue, we erroneously described Chris Larsen as the new CEO of SAP America. In truth Larsen is the president of SAP America; Wolfgang Kemna is the new CEO.
