CRM Managers and Solution Providers - It’s time to re-think what that R means

Part One - CRM’s Early Promise, What Then Went Wrong, and The Big Fix Now Required

I first heard of the concept of Customer Relationship Management, or ‘CRM’ in 1995 from Professor Merlin Stone; he was always ahead of the curve, now sadly departed. He described CRM in glowing terms, something like ‘this new Siebel system enables you to run joined up marketing, sales and customer service, build a single view of your customers and give them a better experience of dealing with your organisation’. That all sounds promising I thought. And for several years and several £m’s spent it was. Deploying CRM imposed some discipline around data and process management and was certainly better for the customer experience of dealing with us. And it even demonstrably improved revenue from customers who we now knew more about and could engage with in more informed conversations. A significant improvement on the prior data warehouse based model with separate systems for each customer-facing functions and no holistic view of the relationship.

And then it all went wrong. As the first dot com crash kicked in, bright sparks in Finance across pretty much all organisations who had deployed CRM at scale figured out they could divert some of that relationship management to ‘contact centres’, and then offshore ones. Whilst possibly making sense from the finance perspective, I would contend that it broke the concept of customer - supplier relationships being a positive, mutually engaged relationship. And that has never returned. In fact it has gotten worse through further technological evolution. Genuine relationship based commerce remains a thing in some B2B markets, for larger ticket products and services anyway. Lower end B2B, almost all B2C and most public sector scenarios have now been pushed ‘online’.

Some might say ‘online makes sense’, and in some ways it does. But it does then lead to the real killer of the equitable, win-win relationship between individual and organisation….., the online ‘agreement’. It goes without saying that these agreements that make us all check a box to confirm we have read and agree with their content when we have not are about as bad a customer experience as one could design.

Next up we have E-commerce, smartphone apps and distance-selling; again much that comes with them are positives. But the customer - supplier relationship they underpin are now also with machines representing organisations, not people. They also enable the scourge of ‘optimisation’; for example, different prices/ product/ service offers based on who/ where you are or how you behave. Mass, continuous surveillance is now the norm; and they are still hidden behind those inequitable agreements that mask all of the above supply side behaviours.

Then we have the knock on effect of the above on regulation - anyone actually want cookies banners and consent pop-ups? One can understand, given the scale of power stacking up on the organisation side, that regulators would look for solutions. But when the best available is those meaningless consent/ legitimate interest ceremonies, with yet more knock on effect on customer experience, then one has to ask whether we need a major reset for the benefit of all. And then we switch on pervasive AI within organisations and the whole experience hits rock bottom. Imagine living in a world in which you are continually battling AI fuelled bots following you around, trying to sell you stuff, dynamically pricing and cross-selling you multiple things before you are allowed to check out; and then selling the data gathered about you (literally) to the highest bidder via AdTech. No thanks…

The recurring thread through all of the above is data; particularly personal data. It is the fuel for customer management in all its guises - CRM, e-commerce, social media, advertising and marketing, analytics/ reporting, data warehousing and now AI. Having been very close to the subject for many years, my take is that the only people doing well out of the current norm are the surveillance machines, data brokers and software/ service providers of the latest shiny data toy that will fix all of the problems. On the client (supply organisation) side, it used to ‘we just need more data’. Then it became ‘we just need to improve our data quality’; now it’s maybe ‘don’t worry AI will fix it for us’. It won’t…

I believe that the approach to personal data in both private and public sectors needs a radical re-think. No amount of money and resource thrown at data that is either silo-ed or run for surveillance purposes will change the fact that both of those approaches have now gone as far as they can. We need that radical re-think if we as a global economy is to do more than just move low grade data around from one silo to another to run sub-optimal processes.

There is a missing piece of the jigsaw that enables this re-think; let me explain….

All of the above systems mentioned that exist within organisations are built on the basis of ‘allow this one organisation to connect to many customers/ citizens’. That is to say, if we, the organisation, build the system for dealing with us then a) we set the rules, b) we define what our customer facing systems make do-able, and c) we manage all the data for both us and the customer. The giant problem that approach triggers is that if each organisation an individual deals with implements the same then the individual must visit each one by one. And as one of the clear effects of much of life moving online is that we all now have many more organisations we deal with, dealing with each of hundreds of organisations is just not feasible.

In other words, each individual-to-organisation customer experience is pretty poor; but the over-arching one when the individual has to repeat very similar processes across 150-200 organisations is a horrible one that triggers huge inefficiency.

The single mental shift, and then the build and deploy process that change all of the above is to put ‘one to many’ capabilities also on the individual side. This is a massive, but inevitable shift. Why inevitable?

1. The current model is broken as above, and regulators are now dialling up the pressure on ‘Big Tech’ surveillance; monopolies will be broken up, weakening the hold the current model is built on.

2. AI, and in particular ‘Personal AI Agents’ significantly lower the barrier to entry to building ‘one to many’ capabilities on the individual side

Here’s an example of a one to many capability built on the individual to illustrate what I mean.

There are many things to be said about that capability in subsequent posts, but for now let’s focus on the ‘one to many’ aspect; that is to say it allows one individual to manage relationships with many organisations from the one dashboard. This tool has a very simple premise; ‘I will manage my data through a dashboard, and I then decide which which other parties get to connect to me to read or write data’.

Critically, ‘one to many’ on both sides effectively requires a ‘many to many’ model to scale; in practice a network. Connections across the network will be driven and enabled by API’s and protocols. On the organisational side that means the existing systems, Salesforce, Shopify, SAP, WordPress, Stripe et al learning how to properly accept inbound and outbound API’s from entities, agents and tools representing individuals.

To be clear, what we are talking about, is moving beyond the Client-Server model that has dominated for the last 20 years, to a Server-Server model (which enables Agent-Agent). That is to say the individual and their agents are coming to the party with high end technical and legal capabilities on their side.

We’ll get into that in Part Two of this series.