Why is CRM CRuMmy?
It really isn’t so bad and it has all the best intentions a capitalist society could embrace – increased cash flow and market share. You gotta love that. Right?
Just think back to the first letter or marketing offer you received from a company you had little or no relationship with but was addressed to you by name. Your first and last name, spelled correctly in wonderful bold print. Not only was I impressed that they seemed to know me but I was inclined to read further into the offer because of the relationship it implied. Like most Americans I was awestruck at first and ran up quite a few charges because of it.
As computers [and ever increasing computing power] revolutionized the way businesses and people could store, retrieve, analyze and act on bits of information smart capitalists were finding ways to first imply a relationship existed between you and their company [before one even did] and then to build one. I still vividly remember the first time I successfully queried a client’s database and produced a mail merge direct mail offer. I was very proud and we had a great return. Of course the point was to ‘WOW’ the customer with a personalized invitation and it worked.
If you were like me you responded to those offers and then bam – once you did give a company permission to build a deeper relationship with you you are trapped. I like to think of it the way primitive tribes reacted to the first photographs they saw. Fearing that their soul would be captured and spirited away was a very real concern to them. Not this time, not with CRM. This time our reactions were quite the opposite of those primatively smart tribes. Yep, me and millions of other ‘individual customers’ we gave our souls away willingly to people who really only want us for our shekels’. And for what? For a false sense of familiarity, to be cool, to be in with big boys…to feel loved?
For me that was a long time ago and since then that warm inner glow that I experienced every time a personalize letter or postcard arrived has been replaced by the &^%%#! I feel everytime another spam arrives in my inbox. And, it isn’t the fault of the marketers or a capitalist society really, even though they are all certainly collaborators. Nor is the desire to reach more customers and reach them with targeted communications, offers they want, ones they will respond to – that is not the problem and is actually a noble idea.
No, to me, the problem was, and still is, with the notion that relationships on the scale of one to millions [one huge corporation to millions of customers] are natural and would be perceived, after a while, as anything other than contrived. Sure there are many other factors that are involved and I’ll explore those in due time, but for now let’s stick with that. In my world, the way this strange bird thinks – the fundamental problem that makes CRM CRuMmy is that relationships on the order of 1 to millions is just not normal, not healthy, not real and therefore a waste of everyone’s time. Unfortunately, for too many corporations, it has also been a great waste of money.
Now – talk amongst yourselves. Go ahead.
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