(Originally published in DMI, Dec 2008)

Let’s start 2007 by turning over a new leaf.  Let’s finally decide that CRM systems are actually BAD for Customer Relationships.

Yes folks, it’s sad but true.  CRM is one of the great money spinners of the last decade, $1billions have been spent to try and bring companies much closer to their customers.  Wonderful plans have been given, pitches made and software juggernauts have been parked across the driveways of big companies, stopping employees from getting on with the job of satisfying customers.

During a recent debate in the office we were reviewing some consumer research that says consumers are increasingly frustrated by call centres.  They think that call centre staff are useless, that they are unhelpful and negative.

Last time I checked, no one that I know said that the best bit about getting up and going to work in the morning was the prospect of making customer’s lives a misery.  Those working in the call centre have to spend much of their life dealing with “characters” on the phone.  And those characters are getting even more colourful.  Why?  Well in a lot of cases most of the simple stuff “I would like to make a straight forward purchase please” or “Can you give me an address I can return goods to please?” or “I would like to cancel my reservation please” has been dealt with by the internet.  We can do the simple things on-line.

So what does that leave for the poor, unsuspecting agent?  Well, the sort of crud that can’t be dealt with on-line.  And if the on-line system can’t handle it, then there is virtually NO chance that the CRM system is going to be able to handle it.  All the agent really has is ears and a better knowledge of where to go to for the answer (maybe).

A CRM system is of no help at all.  And CRM doesn’t seem to be used for the more exotic things either.  Like when I renewed my car recently my car leasing company didn’t even bother to write to me and say “your lease is coming up for renewal, why don’t you buy a new car?”  Why not, well it’s not because they are a small company with no system.  No they are a big company with lots of IT people and a big system.  A system so big that it doesn’t track small things; like customers about to walk away from you.

I genuinely believe that at the heart of the CRM problem is that technology has got in the way of the customer Relationship.  Software companies have seen the possibilities of lots of software, hardware and support and they have said “yea, we’d like some of that”.  But because they were IT companies they tried to deal with Customer Relationships in a very IT way, by putting things into nice boxes.

The problem with this world in which we live in is that I am not a segment or a demographic or an Acorn number or any of that stuff.  I am me and I do stuff for weird reasons.  Most of which are similar to other people’s reasons, but some of them are just bizarre. 

CRM needs to start and end with the customer.  Along the way a computer might get involved, but when you start and end with a system.  Well, what you end up with is a straight jacket.  The result? Irritated customers, irritated staff and irritated management.  Of and a lot of money wasted.

SkyTV in the UK  are in the process of mulling a £700m law suit as a result of a screwed up CRM implementation.  Even though the original contract was only worth £40m.  Perhaps this is indicative of the kind of issues that you get in to when CRM goes wrong.

At the heart of this issue is the customer.  So why don’t customer relationship management systems work?  Well, they often fall down when they encounter humans.  The humans are too lazy or too time pressured to be able to keep things up to date OR humans that just can’t quickly get to the bit of the system that they need to, to get to the facts they need.

If a CRM system is all about classifying and processing customers then customers are going to end up feeling classified and processed.  Instead of answering their questions and comments they are going to be dealt with, in the most expedient way.  Instead of being hugged and made to feel important they are going to feel like they are being sold some other useless thing they didn’t want.

At the end of the day CRM is about the customer relationship.  It starts and ends with the customers.  And here’s the surprise, we are all customers.  Would you treat yourself the way your CRM system treats you?

(originally published in DMI)

Sitting on an EasyJet flight back to Bristol after a fun night out watching Scotland win at Rugby, has brought me to a sudden realisation about how much has changed in the last 10 years and how much of an impact it has on us as marketers.

10 years ago the thought of being able to buy a low cost flight to Edinburgh stay up there, have a few beers and return would only have been the providence of the very rich.  Flights would have cost about £350 (in ten years ago money, so that’s £500 in today’s money).  Hotel would have been more and all of it would have had to be booked through a travel agent.

Now I log-on to EasyJet.com, buy a ticket for under £50 and go to laterooms.com to get accommodation (at a low cost because it’s late availability).

Travel has become a utility; air travel is more like Bus Travel in the old days.  10 years ago I would have to have had a really good reason to go to Edinburgh or Glasgow for the day and now I would expect my staff to have a really good reason why they have not gone. 

In March of next year the world is going to get a little smaller, open sky’s laws will mean that the quantity of flights from Europe to the US and back are going to grow and the cost will fall.  Already you can fly Max-Jet or EOS from London to New York for a fraction of the cost of Virgin or BA.  Even business class travel is coming within reach of the masses.

This shrinking earth we live on brings new opportunities.  The use of low cost, off-shore outsourcing, once the providence of really big companies, is now well within the reach of even small companies.  My own company has had nearly 100 staff working in Lahore Pakistan for the last 3 years.  They are hard working and diligent, but now we have the opportunity to employ people in Poland and Portugal which are just 2 hours from Bristol on a low cost flight.

Outsourcing has allowed us to broaden our horizons, to invest in doing things we simply could not do if we were in the UK.  It allows little people to have big dreams. 

Direct Marketing has been at the heart of this as it is at the heart of the development of LateRooms and EasyJet.  Direct Marketing has allowed markets to grow and develop.  It forces people who had never heard of cost per sale or targeted advertising to really begin to learn a new language.

Last week I was watching a show called Hotel Doctor in which a guru shows up and tries to help a dim-witted hotel owner run a business.  One of the things this Hotel Doctor encouraged was that the owner should sell capacity using LateRooms and vary the price according to demand.  Within months the hotel had gone from empty to full.  This kind of tool is revolutionising business, but the poor hotelier was staring wide-eyed at the screen as the system was demonstrated to him.  He just couldn’t believe that it would work.

The question has to be asked, therefore, whether the current style of DM training is too elitist and disengaged from the realities of business.  It focuses in on training young pups for big business, when perhaps what it should do is train old dogs in small businesses.  It should be teaching people to broaden the minds and their horizons.

If DM is the new way of doing business in a global economy, then DM needs to come down from it’s pedestal and muck it in with the average Jo, teaching them all those amazing skills of how to write compelling copy and eye catching headlines.

 The halls of the IDMF and DMA conferences should be filled with DM’ers.  Their remoteness is not because of the cost of travel or accommodation, but because the big business of DM is no longer in the hands of people with huge budgets, it’s in the hands of the little hotel owner trying to eek out a living.  They don’t have big budgets, but there are lots of little budgets.  So maybe we need DM training that works for people with little budgets.  And perhaps we might not call it DM, perhaps we might call it, “the dummies guide to …” or “How to make money out of Google Adwords” or “How to Make Email work for you”

Next we will be considering a reduced membership charge to the IDM and DMA for the 1,000,000’s of small entrepreneurs who don’t realise that” It’s DM, Stupid!”

It’s the end of my summer holiday, but I sit here on a balcony in Portugal, slaving away over a hot keyboard so that ED won’t shout at me for missing my deadline.  It’s been an interesting holiday, for once in my life, no kids, just me and Mrs H, sharing a week away together.

It has given me a chance to reflect and review the events of the last year which have been amazing, and I wonder whether the events of the next year will be as amazing, whether we will continue to grow and prosper within our sphere of business or whether something will come along and take a side swipe at us.  I don’t know, but paranoia helps.  “Only the paranoid survive” as Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel said.

During my break I have had the good fortune to bring with me a copy of Jack: Straight From the Gut.  The Autobiography of Jack Welch, former Chairman of GE.  For 20 years he headed up GE and saw it grow dramatically and globally over  that period of time.

I am not a huge fan of Autobiographies; I had to read a Stephen King book at the beginning of the holiday before I could summon up the energy to read this.  But I have to say that the easy reading style and the way that he tells the story of his time at GE has drawn me into the book and the Welch Way. 

You may be wondering what all this has to do with DMI, and to some extent the answer is a lot.  GE owns GE Capital, formerly Welbeck finance. GE is a formidable player within the direct and consumer space and millions of GE products are bought and sold direct every year as a result of their fanatical interest in e-Business.

The more I read of Welch, the more I try to compare myself with him, the more I find myself debating about him and his style.  I am a little guy.  An entrepreneur.  I run my own little business in Bristol.  GE probably spends more on tissue to wipe the sneezes and tears away from staff than I turn over in a good year.  What can a man like Welch possibly offer me.  We are miles apart.

Well, actually, there’s quite a bit.  Admittedly, I don’t have the luxury to take big swinging hits like he did.  I don’t have the luxury to take 10 years to turn around a business, like he did.  I don’t have a really good board of governors giving me advice, like he did.

But I can tune into many of his key themes as a manager: Integrity, the community, informality, self-confidence, passion, stretch, celebrations, aligning rewards with measurements, differentiation, owning the people, appraisals all the time, culture counts.  And many more.  You can read the book and find out for yourself.

I admit, I don’t practice all of these enough, but when you add them all up and you remained focussed on them, you can achieve great things.  Look at the issue of Aligning Rewards with Measurement.  Yes our staff get paid to show up and do a job.  But we don’t focus enough on what it is they do and rewarding them for doing more.  More substantially we don’t focus on making sure that the “more” that they do is helping the business gets where it needs to go. So Jack is going to help me resolve that.  He’s given me some thoughts, along with a little book called “The greatest management principle”, but that was the subject of another article, about a decade ago.

But it’s not easy being an entrepreneur.  One minute you are managing, next your are reviewing an expense account, then you are trying to work with a customer, then looking at how to reduce costs, then a new product, then making sure you have enough cash to pay all the bills.  What with one thing and another it a surprise that anything gets done at all.

Jack makes it look like running GE for 20 years was easy.  That anyone could have done it.  Anyone of course, with his drive and his determination, his vision and his dogged style.   Ask yourself this question, though.  Could you have done it?  What about your business makes you frustrated what could Jack have done for you?

Or ask yourself these questions, why should you be made CEO of your business, what would you do in the first 60 days?  What would you fix?  What would you close?  What would you get fanatical about?

Knowing more about Jack helped me know more about me.  And it’s the sort of insight you can take to the bank.

Many people ask me what I want to do when I retire, hopefully having made an obscene amount of money doing what I do on competitor benchmarking.  I have a cunning plan; I want to write two books. 

The first book which has the working title “Nasty Business” is about what happens when things go wrong in business and what you, as an individual can do to limit the damage.  To save you waiting a long time and ploughing through hundreds of pages of stuff that you aren’t interested in, in search of a point, here’s the point.  Keep copies of everything, off site. And don’t believe a word that anyone says unless you know it to be the truth.

This advice comes as a result of me being accused of theft from my previous employers.  The case ended up being prosecuted by the police, exactly two years ago this month.  The truth was that the person who made the accusations lied and thought I didn’t have evidence to prove myself innocent; it was the word of three of them against one of me.  They thought that once I walked out of their offices, I wouldn’t be able to prove anything.  As a result evidence could be edited and the truth concealed. 

I was astonished that the justice system did not find out about this until the Judge finally put a stop to it half way through the trial, threw the case out and awarded me costs.  He admonished the prosecution for wasting everyone’s time.  All of this happened because I happened to have copies of the documents that told the truth, which had been withheld from prosecutors.

My lawyer advised me that the best way to get even was not to counter sue, but to go out and make a lot of money, which would drive the protagonists crazy. I did that, but the story is too good to waste.  So I started collecting stories of others who have been “screwed” and discovered that it happens more often than you could possibly imagine. 

I collected the story of the Investment Banker who a major city institution tried to swindle out of millions of share options by fabricating his signature.  I collected the story about an internal auditor who was fired after discovering the CEO of a film studio had been diverting studio property to his own house.

The stories have a common theme, as soon as the person gets on the wrong side of the company; the company closes ranks to get whatever it wants, in some cases it doesn’t matter whether those things are legal or illegal.  In fact the bigger the company, or in my case, the bigger the ego of the accusers, the greater the lengths they are prepared to go to.  They consider themselves above the law.  Believe me, if I hadn’t heard a major DM industry figure perjure himself with my own two ears, I wouldn’t believe it, but you will have to wait for the book for the rest of the story.

So, in short, keeping a back-up copy of everything, emails sent and those received, is a crucial requirement for the modern employee.

The second book I want to write is about what you do corporately when things go wrong.  This one is slightly more difficult to reach a conclusion on.  Again it is rooted in the way my company was treated in the media when I was accused of theft.  It made a sensational story.  Of course when I was found to be innocent, that didn’t make such an exciting story, virtually zero column inches.  What was more surprising was that the legal action was initiated by a competitor, who took advantage of the front page negative publicity to call all my clients and tell them what an evil person I was and what a bad company I ran.  When I was found innocent, they didn’t call my clients to tell them that they had got it wrong.

You see this regularly within other corporations.  Just look at GSK (Glaxo Smith Kline) and the problems they are having with Avandamet.  The drug accounts for a huge percentage of their sales and profits.  A piece of research, apparently commissioned and paid for by GSK’s competitors attacked the drug for possible issues that it caused in an article hastily published by the New England Journal of medicine.  The result;  Doctors stop prescribing Avandament and start prescribing the competitors drug, even though it is clinically the same thing.

So what does your company do when it all goes wrong?  Well the critical thing to do is tell the truth.  Don’t weasel it, the truth will always find its way out, beyond that every strategy needs to be different.  In our case we toughed it out and held our nerve and made sure we communicated effectively with our customers.

I am a great fan of simple stuff, that’s probably because I am a Bear of Very Little Brain complicated things make me befuddled.  And you wouldn’t like me when I am befuddled.

Imagine my great excitement recently while passing through one of those Airport bookshops to find a book called simple*ology by Mark Joyner.  Flicking through the pages before buying it I saw there were lots of pictures and short paragraphs.  My type of book, especially useful if you have ADD, which I do!

The book is an excellent way of challenging your energy towards the things you want and avoiding the pitfalls along the way.  It teaches you how to interpret a conversation or a discussion, it teaches you how to set objectives and it teaches you the five laws of simple*ology which are

1)     The law of straight lines

2)     The law of clear vision

3)     The law of focussed attention

4)     The law of focussed energy

5)     The inescapability of action/reaction

You will have to buy the book or go to www.simpleology.com to find out more.  But I can assure you it’s powerful stuff.  Believe me I have read almost every hocus pocus book on the subject of positive thinking including “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne (which I have to say is complete cobblers).  The thing I like about this book is that it forces responsibility back on you.  Firstly it asks you to be clear about what you want and then helps you focus and channel your energy into getting it.

All of this starts with the most complicated bit, targeting.  Asking yourself what do I want? This may sound simple but think about it.  When you say you want something, how clear are you about it?  For instance, if you say I want to be financially secure, what do you mean?  Enough money to be able to stop work?  Great, and then what?  Have you ever heard about people who work hard all their life, retire with a nice little nest egg and then drop dead.  Being clear about your goals and targets is critical in life and it is also extremely difficult.

Think about it in Marketing terms.  The purpose of “Above the line” (is there still a line) is to raise awareness.  The purpose of “below the line” marketing is to elicit response.  But business only makes money when it sells stuff.  Great marketing without back end service delivery or good sales is just a voice clamouring in the wilderness.

The key to business is to align what you want with what your customers want, in so doing you deliver value.  The better your needs match theirs, the better the reward.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the internet.  I have recently been conducting research into advertise effectiveness on-line.   In the research we conducted we sponsored over 500 keywords that effectively matched a particular single product business.  The results where fascinating and, thanks to the wonders of goggle reporting, are available for me to share with you.  When you look at click through rate, there were a number of keywords that had huge numbers of impressions and developed huge numbers of clicks.  However, they did not deliver sales.  The ones that did deliver sales where the much more obscure words that had lower volumes of searches.

When you dig under the psychology of this it becomes more clear, the more obscure the search the more focussed the searcher.  They don’t want to know what is on at the movies.  They want to know what’s playing at the Vue cinema, in Bristol, Tonight after 8pm.  Meeting their targets means that you may have fewer visits but more sales for each visit, because you are meeting targets.  The trick, of course, is getting enough volume to make it worth your while.

But at the end of the day it’s all pretty simple, you have a clear vision, you focus your attention and your energy on it and you constantly review whether you are hitting it.  Whether it’s life or DM, it doesn’t matter that much.  Although PayPerClick gives you much faster feedback than life.  Either way it’s worth reading the book and the stats.