By Roland Koltchakian, CX specialist Oracle France
To understand these developments, it is first essential to revisit a certain number of definitions and underlying concepts when we talk about CRM or CEM (for Customer Experience Management). The idea is not to oppose these two concepts but rather to understand CEM as a logical and natural evolution of CRM and its historical promise. Another mistake would be to imagine that the digital economy and the various technological disruptions associated with it would have purely and simply signed the disappearance of CRM thinking in the "traditional" sense of the term. Falling into this somewhat simplistic or binary reading mode would amount to ignoring the diversity and complexity of the realities that structure the commercial world as a whole when we talk about "customer relations".
Are CRM projects still "trendy" or have they been definitively overtaken by CEM projects?
Faced with such a question, we may be tempted to answer with a strong bias, or to "think long term" in order to avoid the pitfalls of certain simplistic shortcuts consisting of imagining that certain phenomena occur by chance. Rethinking the history of CRM thinking and projects means going back to the first half of the 90s with the appearance and development of the first so-called "modern" contact centers. These were the result of companies' desire to better structure flows, interactions and processes related to the customer in an economic context increasingly marked by the growing weight of the tertiary sector and the service economy, thus laying the foundations for the next cycle to come: that of the immaterial and disintermediation.
A first wave of projects thus appears between tertiarization, computerization and consumerization in full mutation, and gradually installs the idea of "managing the customer" with fairly simple objectives at the start (processing customer requests offline or by telephone, storing and recording information, connecting part of the customer processes to the company's back office, etc.). However, this wave also imposes the need to "softwareize" this customer relationship and therefore makes IT departments the natural interlocutors on the design and implementation of the technological solutions concerned.
IT departments have therefore learned as they went along, helped by the large consulting firms in the 90s, and have enabled companies to escape the "primordial broth" of CRM (an empirical approach without a real underlying strategy, still limited efficiency and productivity, strong limitations on management means and a vision of CRM diluted in the company without any real sponsorship identified in the organization, etc.). They then gradually evolved towards a more structured maturity model including in particular process-based rationalization approaches, an increasingly urbanized and governed IS (Information System), as well as the implementation of the first decision-making tools such as reporting cubes. These developments have thus made it possible to extend the CRM project to other customer functions such as sales or marketing, sometimes at the cost of oversized projects, some of which were failures.
Between 2000 and 2010, this phenomenon of CRM entropy continued to develop and accelerate under the effect of the first "internet bubble" and then of "E-Business" post-internet crisis, and whose intrinsic characteristics always imply more processes, more channels. This also requires finally succeeding in effectively integrating the "front office" with the "back office" and for companies, to succeed in the challenge of professionalizing their processes and customer standards through dedicated quality standards. Without counting of course on the need to manage at least from a technical point of view, a constantly growing information capital on the customer.
CRM architectures thus find their maturity models with their fundamentals such as a "customer data warehouse", sales or customer service automation tools and for the most mature companies or those most exposed to "data", the possibility of operating the first marketing management and automation solutions through a dedicated "datamart".
End of the story - Is the die cast?
Against all expectations, many observers might be surprised by the number of companies from "traditional" sectors that are still fully concerned by the implementation of these fundamentals or by the significant modernization of certain components that have become unsuitable for the digital age.
CRM projects in the philosophical sense of the term are therefore far from dead. Some companies, seen as efficient and recognized, continue to fight to reconstitute and exploit a unified customer vision and to succeed in sophisticating their marketing campaigns without this degenerating into organizational chaos or commercial amateurism.
While the philosophy remains broadly the same, the approach linked to a CRM project has evolved and operated a form of "revolution" by breaking with almost secular logics based on complex approaches, sequential cycles with a mechanical sequence of tasks and not always the right feedback loops. All this with the ultimate goal of finally integrating the advantages and new room for maneuver brought by innovations such as cloud computing and SAAS, and which presuppose a new relationship with the "finished product" that a business application can be at the service of the customer.
The approaches relating to CRM projects are therefore more optimized than truly transformed, through certain sources of acceleration and agility between the initial design and the final delivery; this thus allows companies to have a CRM architecture on shorter deadlines and more adapted to the new realities of digital and the "servitization" of the product offer, more adapted to the reality of customer behaviors, whether B2B or B2C.
Which companies should think of their project as a "CRM project" and those that should think of it as a "CEM project"? There is not necessarily a simple answer; Here again, the very nature of this question can lead to the risk of a somewhat outdated ideological stance at a time when the profusion of ecosystems of technological solutions, "buzzwords" or a new dialectic often contribute to maintaining the hesitation of companies to take the plunge.
For some companies, it is above all a question of thinking about this question, beyond the nature and characteristics of the market in which they operate, by integrating the historical weight of what IT departments call "legacy", this IT heritage that is so difficult and so heavy to develop... However, if your name is Uber, Netflix, Amazon, Tinder or you are a "pure player", it is obvious that the very nature of your business and your model will lead you to focus above all on creating value through the customer experience rather than the constant search for rationalization or hyper productivity of your IS. Which is rather good because, like many of your colleagues, you will have chosen not to "own" your IT assets as such but to entrust them and have them fully or partially operated by the major cloud providers, Oracle or others; with the obvious exception of certain critical assets such as the secret codes of your algorithms and your application!
Thus, all of your resources, tools, processes and skills must be dedicated to maximizing the value of the customer experience as it can be experienced and perceived by your customers or by the users of your service, and this in a global context in which everyone knows both the challenges and the requirements between: Trust & "Data Privacy", open innovation, hyper mobility, complexity of behaviors, globalization of the available product offer, proliferation of screens and advertising saturation, emergence of new distribution methods and structures... But above all the famous "customer experience premium" in an era that tends to trivialize and standardize brands and their products.
The prerequisite for approaching the notion of a CEM project is based above all on the notion of hyper-personalization of the experience, which has become an obsession for certain “platform companies”. However, succeeding in the challenge of this hyper-personalization in the new logic of temporality, such as our daily consumption seems to impose more and more each day, presupposes a new relationship with the way in which we can capture, understand and analyze reality when it comes to putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes. As you have therefore understood, the prism of observation between a CRM project and a CEM project is radically opposed or even reversed. Where CRM projects seemed to impose a reading grid centered on the efficiency and productivity of the IS, internal processes and the reduction of CAPEX, the CEM project emerges in an original way by proposing a new report, even a new doctrine of technological means, of the use of data but also a strong hybridization of resources and skills in the service of this objective of hyper personalization of this customer experience.
The current era therefore establishes the "agile mode" as one of the most characteristic attributes of the CEM project. Agile mode and design thinking are the two keys to thinking, designing, developing and continuously optimizing a service and an experience desired by the consumer, in line with their uses and propensity to adopt the service as well as their frequency of use. It is therefore a question of observing user behavior in real time, understanding the phenomena that create or destroy value, proposing and testing improvement hypotheses, implementing them and adapting them over time in the context of iterative and endless loops.
The challenge of the CEM project is based above all on a notion of multidisciplinarity in a labor market marked by the rarity of certain profiles and the emergence of new professions that are still relatively emerging despite the creation of training courses. Is there a typical profile for an ergonomist or a "product owner"? Do you become a UX specialist through technical expertise or thanks to a visual aesthetic sensitivity that is very often a key criterion in the adoption or abandonment of a service or application? How can we successfully synchronize all of these areas of expertise in order to combine business efficiency and quality of the customer experience? These are some of the new challenges associated with CEM project management where, beyond certain eminently rational aspects such as those that structure CRM projects, it will also be a question of playing on a certain alchemy or even a new form of magic in order to succeed in generating the most powerful lever there is in terms of customer engagement: the emotional connection.
What are the main obstacles to successfully carrying out this type of project and how can they be circumvented?
The first mistake would be above all to reduce these projects to purely technological approaches whose sole purpose would be to generate productivity gains or to please the financial director by reducing the annual TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the customer application domain. However, and the market has already demonstrated this, it is possible to reconcile cost reduction and increase in "customer value". A better perceived value for the customer and an indicator such as the NPS or the "customer effort score" can help to materialize and quantify.
If we want to avoid the pitfalls that have been the subject of the long history of CRM and the more recent history of CEM, we must first consider these projects as the result of the strong and affirmed desire to transform the company around the customer. Such a transformation process rarely results from an illumination that would arrive by chance!
This is probably why I invite you once again to think about this type of approach in the "long term" and to root it deeply in the strategic vision, organization, beliefs and elements of the company's culture.
Let's take the example of these companies/brands that are seen and recognized as "customer experience champions" across the Atlantic, such as Zappos, Amazon, Apple, USAA or Virgin Atlantic... If we take a closer look at the genesis of their models and the trajectory of these companies, everyone will be able to see that if they have become true experiential brands, this has not been done by multiplying technological investments on all subjects or by being systematically positioned on "premium" logic. Each of these companies brings together a certain number of common characteristics such as the strength of their leadership; This is very often personified and embodied by a personality who is always a little "out of the ordinary" whose obsession, beyond being an entrepreneur by nature, is above all to "break the codes" of a market or an industry while making customer satisfaction an absolute objective in terms of business strategy. It is this obsession with the customer that is expressed in a "brand manifesto" or "corporate purpose" visible at all levels of the company and which constitutes a cultural reference understood and shared by all.
Thus, and if the management of your company adopts this type of posture with sincerity and the strong and constant desire to transform this posture into a real attribute of your brand, you will have already given yourself the means to overcome a large part of the obstacles that you will face during the design and deployment phases of your CRM architecture. Quite simply because your approach will be based on a solid and essential foundation that can be that of conviction and confidence in this conviction.
Of course, this is not to deny the weight or the factor of inertia that can constitute other obstacles and against which the virtue of good intentions alone cannot suffice. I want to talk about one of the most frequently cited obstacles when talking about CRM or CEM projects, which is: the silo organization.
Understanding all the reasons and factors that have led to one of the most chronic problems when talking about the obstacles to the "customer-oriented" company could undoubtedly be the subject of a book in its own right, as the roots of this phenomenon go back so far into the origins of CRM and as this siloing also undergoes a form of entropy with this new side effect that can be "the creation of silos within silos".
This entropy is based on the more or less controlled multiplication of distribution or customer service structures, each with their own system, channels and associated processes. For example, are all hypermarkets today capable of managing interactions, offers, transactions, complaints, product returns, promotions in a unified way, regardless of the format concerned, between checkout in the hypermarket, click & collect? store collection, drive-through, purchase on the e-commerce site or on the mobile application when this would be the absolute purpose of the "single customer account"?
While certain technologies have made it possible to record significant progress in the ability to reconstruct and manage this unique vision of the customer over time, technologies such as "master data management", "ID Graph" or "Identity management", to which we could add the optimization and rationalization of data management environments, it is clear that the challenge remains immense and that part of the answers to this challenge can sometimes lie in the "dark side" of organizations such as the divergence of interests between different entities or an intrinsic hyper complexity and where it is a question of trying to limit the collateral damage between the customer and the company.
So, who could finally help companies overcome this major obstacle to "customer centricity" that the siloed company can be? The Chief Digital Officer? The Chief Data Officer? Is there even a “providential” function to finally succeed in deconstructing silos within the company? And with what mandate and what power has the COMEX entrusted it?
For my part, I do not necessarily believe in the providential man or woman but rather in the virtues of collective intelligence and new organizational models "in networks" with a customer experience department having operational relays / referents in each of the other departments interacting with the customer: Marketing, E-commerce, sales, customer service, logistics or even within a financial department for the most mature companies. Without counting of course, the importance of the duo that this department will have to build and bring to life harmoniously and efficiently day after day with the IT department! In essence, it is therefore a question of going well beyond the simple fact of providing an AMOA (Project Management Assistant) between business management and marketing management (for example) in the hope of resolving this very vast challenge that constitutes the company in silos.
What are the differences between customer relationship consolidation projects and customer experience improvement projects?
If we consider that in 2018, the majority of CRM projects are part of the logic of a more or less significant existing system depending on the components concerned, we can therefore subscribe to the principle of "consolidation" where the approach to be pursued should consist of taking into account the maturity of this existing system with its strengths and limitations in order to modernize it and adapt it to the necessary developments that digital technology can imply.
Typically, a customer relationship consolidation project could consist, for example, of making the information base on the customer more reliable as can be the famous single customer reference and which very often constitutes the priority investment to get out of the siloed company syndrome, and which we have described and commented on at length above. This reliability objective can reside in the capacity to integrate and consolidate flows from different data sources or business systems, but each contributing at their level to manage part of a customer journey, whether in acquisition, loyalty or in the life cycle linked to the use of the product.
Another example when we talk about a customer relationship consolidation project would be to adapt a marketing automation / campaign management brick to new digital channels or media such as native display, retargeting, optimization under constraints or even mobile notifications. This approach aims to finally go further than "simple" email marketing (often seen as the insurmountable horizon when talking about customer animation), in order to promote integration but above all real-time synchronization with other communication channels or digital media, in order to diversify communication tactics and mechanics in a context where the level of communication pressure on the email channel tends to generate a phenomenon of indifference or even outright rejection on the part of the consumer.
Finally, consolidating a customer relationship project also means promoting its organizational expansion by making it possible to create (finally) more transversality between the different departments that interact with the customer. This type of trend is particularly visible in the context of projects aimed at providing tele-advisors operating in contact centres dedicated to after-sales service or the management of booking processes with detailed marketing data giving an exhaustive view of the offers and requests that will have been sent to the customer before contact is made. Stated in this way, the approach could seem full of common sense or even simplistic. In fact, this type of integration, beyond the technical aspects, also refers the company to its vision of customer animation and the way in which it can be disseminated throughout the company depending on the context linked to the interaction or specific management rules.
Customer experience improvement projects are based on a continuous improvement approach made possible by the systematic, almost exhaustive and real-time collection of feedback related to the use of a customer/user of an application or digital service. This new agility in capturing and understanding reality, combined with the realities of a "lighter" technological component, allows for a new relationship with this principle of improvement and the time frame in which these improvements are implemented.
But here again and beyond this apparent simplicity associated with this approach, it is a question of taking into account the weight and challenges related to two major dimensions: hyper-diversity and hypercomplexity. Hyper diversity of consumers and users, their needs, their uses, their motivations and their sensitivity to competing offers or other substitute universes (imagine that you are the publisher of a consumer mobile application, the challenge for your company will be to retain the user of your application in an increasingly broad and increasingly attractive competitive universe, while the monthly budget of your user is not a priori extensible ...) and hyper complexity of the journeys on a market increasingly structured by the interpenetration between different ecosystems in which a platform offer can evolve for example.
"The Devil is in the details" ... This proverb could sum up on its own the philosophy of an approach to improving the customer experience where the level of granularity of the detail on which developers and other UX specialists will try to act, can sometimes be revealed on very fine levels such as the location of a button in a control tunnel or the scrolling necessary to arrive at critical information on a web page. It will involve acting on elements of ergonomics but also aesthetics since yes, the beauty of the service or application is now part of the demands and criteria for adoption and attachment of the consumer / user. This logic of continuous improvement explains the reason why the world of applications and UX is based on a principle of almost permanent renewal of "releases" in order to tend towards this optimum that can be the hyper personalization of the customer experience.
Finally, and to conclude, is there any need to recall the fairly strong differences that can exist on the profile of the different project teams, between CRM consolidation projects and UX improvement projects that are sometimes compared to a culture clash between "consultants in ties" and "hipsters in fixies"? Beyond this somewhat caricatured vision, my conviction is that each of these two schools would benefit from borrowing from one another in order to build what should be the new philosophy of customer experience management projects for the years to come: an approach to customer experience always centered on the principles of hyper-personalization, and capable of rapidly and large-scale industrialization of the most recent innovations (AI, chatbots, blockchain, etc.) in an era marked by the growing influence of C2C exchanges.
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