Michael Maoz

Sitting through planning meetings on improvements to the customer experience, it becomes clear quickly that management is intermittently focused on customer excellence. They are digging into sales forecasts and projections, and working with the CFO on how to further reduce costs. And they are thinking about the inventory of applications that has gathered like odd socks near the clothes dryer.

But not much is getting done, despite great efforts in some departments. Marketing intelligence is almost an oxymoron, in this way: despite capturing massive amounts of data in the form of attributes (average spend, product preference, frequency of spending, correlation with cohort groups, timing of purchases….), this potential insight rarely is acted upon at the time of a customer interaction. How can you tell? Just go out to a website – pick your favorite, but leave Amazon.com out of this. They are one of the 1-3% of companies that really get it. But the other 97-99% are fair game. Go to your bank website, or car website, or insurance website, or airline, or grocer, or your own corporate website. After you log in, see what happens.

Given up yet? Maybe they offered to chat with you. Wow! Web 2.0! Social CRM! You can post to a forum. You can Twitter. Come on. Do they know you? Know anything meaningful about why you might be there? Save you steps? Guide you to the right place? Make you a relevant offer? Better yet, did you get a proactive outbound notification of some information that they KNEW you were in need of hearing?

So, marketing is on a tear, and the customer experience is just torn. And our CIO? Where is she? With the CFO working on lowering the cost of operations.

We have evolved CRM in theory over the past 15 years, but by always harping on the fact that it isn’t about technology, we think that magically a good concept will take wing. Like time travel or psychokinesis.

The CIO, the head of customer service/experience, and marketing have a hard time sitting together on a regular basis to drive long term strategies with measurable deliverables. That leaves your clients having a hard time taking our businesses seriously.