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Q:  CRM: Huge ROI or Broken Promise?
 
The fact is that most companies that have invested heavily in operational and strategic CRM initiatives are not getting the returns they were promised on their CRM investments. At a recent conference, I heard a high profile industry analyst say that less than 1% of companies have gotten the desired ROI from their CRM initiatives. Companies that have invested millions of dollars in creating datamarts, personalizing email, customizing websites and applying analytics to increase customer profitability are asking "How can I boost the return?" The answer is to optimize customer profitability by connecting customer channels in real time.
 
Today, companies aren't holding ongoing dialogues with their customers. A customer that ignores an offer on the web site shouldn't receive the same offer from the company over the phone. Instead, the call center should know about the customer's behavior immediately, so that when the customer calls, the right offer is made to grow his or her profitability. If this isn't happening, every time customers choose to interact with companies via different touch points they have to reintroduce themselves. The result: customers don't receive a consistent 360-degree view of the company, and the company fails to maximize the value of its CRM investment. Even worse, organizations may alienate customers and cause abandonment.
 
For CRM to live up to its promise, companies must synchronize channels in real time. They need call centers, web personalization, email marketing capabilities and other CRM infrastructure, but personalization based on a limited view of the customer fails to drive shareholder value. Channels have to talk to one another by sharing up-to-the-second knowledge of customer behavior occurring in other channels. This allows each customer dialogue to begin where the last dialogue ended, enabling a consistent experience that maps out a course to profitable customer behavior. Connecting channels dramatically grows ROI on the technology within each one. The bottom line -- in order to make your customers more valuable and maximize their profitability, each interaction must be shared and analyzed across all communication channels in real time.