Michael Maoz

The senior CRM product managers at some of the prominent software houses have abandoned their positions for ‘other opportunities’ in the past nine months. Why is 2008 such a grueling time to be a product manager at a software company working on CRM-related applications? Or to be a professional proposing CRM products and processes at your company? Well, here is an interesting corollary: you are telling us that customer service agent churn rates have also gone up over the past year, even in a tight job market. What is going on?

In a tough economy, getting a business to invest in more consistent processes to ‘satisfy customers’ rather than ‘to save money’ does not go down well. If I am in IT, I’d rather show that I saved money, reduced application complexity, more uptime, faster response rates, fewer servers, less time in training and support – items that can be measured. Intangibles like ‘better customer experience’ are a stretch.

The other problem is that nobody grew up hoping to be a customer service agent, or service manager, or supervisor. Don’t take my word for it: just ask your personnel. It isn’t something you aspire to. The job lacks respect in the organization. Marketing folks have the suits, and sales people where the Rolex. Customer service managers have the antacid bottles. If customer service is to carry more weight in the organization, it will be when two things happen: 1) the metrics are in place to show, explicitly, that the service process has resulted in higher retention, follow on sales, higher marketing campaign response rates, and lower costs. The second? Here I loosely paraphrase John D. Rockefeller: Aside from doing the right thing, you have to let people know you are doing the right thing. Otherwise, all of your hard work goes unrecognized, and some other department will definitely stand up and take the credit.