I was just on a company’s web site, looking at a product that I was interested in trying out. The site had a button “Call Me Now” which allowed the user to fill out the typical contact form, and would have a phone call placed immediately thereafter. Sure enough, within seconds, my desk phone rang, and I picked it up to hear a recorded message from the company, stating that a sales representative would be with me shortly. After about 30 seconds of normal hold music, the system hung up on me! I tried again, with the same result. I would have been happy to wait on-hold for a minute or two, but to have a system that simply hung up on me was completely unacceptable. At that point, I had soured on the company, and moved on in my search for a similar product.
In recent years, some have suggested renaming Customer Relationship Management to Customer Experience Management. All of the bells and whistles that accompany CRM are wonderful, if they work to provide a better experience to the end customer. The example above has happened to me before with other technologies — auto-attendants, online chat, and more. A customer’s experience will influence their perception of a company, and impact future purchasing decisions. If technology is implemented to provide for a more fluid and interactive customer experience, it is imperative to ensure that the technology actually works, or the customer, like myself this morning, will quickly bail. Customers need products, but they don’t want the hassle of dealing with companies that can’t communicate. So if you promote a means of communication that doesn’t work or is confusing, simplify it, make it work, or take it away as an option. Many opportunities are lost because of situations beyond a company’s control. It is critical that lost opportunities do not also result from situations that are easily within a company’s control, such as its use of communications technology.
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All CRM providers need to remember this. Most CRM systems are still built to look more like a relational database than an application that average business users would want to interact with. Not only must the applications work from a functional perspective, they must work from a usability perspective.
We must all work to simplify everything from entry to reporting. If we don’t, people will simply find another CRM system from a vendor that finally understands this simple point.
John Moore
http://twitter.com/JohnFMoore