In the telecommunications
industry, interest is growing around the concept of Customer Life Cycle
Management (CLM). This concept goes beyond traditional time-views of CRM
and embodies the customer history as a real-time predictor, and also
aims towards the long-neglected aspect of customer retention.
“John Strand, CEO of Strand
Consulting in Denmark, supports the view of a more one to one dialogue
with customers and stresses the role that this approach plays in
today’s mobile world. He defines this individual approach as Customer
Life Cycle Management (CLM). ‘Customer Life Cycle Management (CLM) is
next generation CRM. In the past, operators would just target customers with different messages to sell services. CLM
is different. You are looking at things from a lifecycle perspective
and you are focusing on the individual customer. The big difference
between CRM and CLM is that with CRM you are communicating to segments of users when you believe they need something. CLM is more about one to one communication – it’s about knowing what they want and delivering it when they want it.’” – How CLM can Optimise Revenue in Today’s Telecoms Market
Integrated data systems are important for this approach.
“Linking your customer service and support solution
with back office applications enhances the customer experience and
increases operational efficiency.” – Integrate to Differentiate
To the lay view, customer service is simply
a matter of people treating people right. But within operations that
may span thousands of agents and deal with millions of customers,
everything has to work by a system. And IT has to put the technology in
place that allows the system to run. So the dependence on technology to
enable the right interaction is great.
“However, if it had put in place good procedures in
the first place, the problem would have been dealt with rapidly, I
would have had my overpayment dealt with (if it had happened at all), I
would have taken out the extra services I am still waiting for from
them—and I would have been telling everyone how impressed I was with
them. Now, I am that worst nightmare: the unhappy customer who tells
others, and those others tend to put a lot more store in the opinion of
those who have had experience of a company than in the marketing blurb
from the company itself.” – Has Technology Killed CRM Strategy?
So in today’s world, when we talk about
customer service and support, we’re talking about technology to a
make-or-break degree. And the all-too-human blind spot of corporate culture – the focus on its offerings rather than the consumers of its offerings – is probably more amenable to change through technology than by charismatic revolution, as we have suggested many times.
