EVOLUTION OF BPR

CRM worst practices

Posted on the October 24th, 2008 under CRM by Gregory Yankelovich

I think it was Tom Siebel, who funded first serious efforts to document, develop and publicize CRM Best Practices, I am aware of. Over the years many companies and practitioners engaged into this very meaningful exercise.  It is unfortunate that many people prefer to re-discover and re-invent them on their own, unaware of existing wealth of knowledge and experience, and repeating the same mistakes over and over.

One of the best and most lighthearted CRM Best Practices materials are created by John Cleese of Monty Python Flying Circus fame. It is very funny, and extremely meaningful, but I don’t need to belabor on value of other people experience -

“there are three kinds of people:

1. people who learn on other peoples mistakes - there are very few of these;

2. people who have learned on their own mistakes - it is a larger group, and

3. people who never learn.”

What can one possibly do to completely undermine the company investment in CRM technology? So one of the CRM primary goals is to create consistent customer experience and communications with the company that foster loyal and subsequently profitable relationship. Well, that is a theory, but consider the experience of this Comcast customer - 10 days after installation of their promotional Internet service I still cannot make my wireless router work. I have wasted hours of Comcast support personnel, my own and my, less technologically challenged, friends’ time trying to troubleshoot the problem; I have driven to purchase, and then to return, a new router on suggestion of clueless support technician, I have wasted my wireless minutes listening to Comcast sales agents opinion about the problem. At the end I just found out that Comcast has decided to promote their Home Network product, which offers integrated modem/router, at home installation and different rates. So they blocked dynamic IP renewal for new customers to force them into higher priced new offering, but did not tell anybody.

I do not pass a judgement on the value of their products here. I just want to point out that none of the Comcast employees knew anything about it, and still don’t because nobody bothered to communicate it in concise and meaningful fashion.

It must be even harder punishment to work for company like that, then to be it’s customer. Here is your lesson in CRM worst practice - disrespect your employees, hide information from them and throw them in front of angry customers. How much loyalty does it create? Not much - I just moved my TV service to the Direct TV. Internet goes next.

Does the customer matter?

Posted on the August 17th, 2008 under Uncategorized by Gregory Yankelovich

I just had an infuriating experience with my ISP - Comcast, but this is not about boring you with yet another rant. It is about Religion. More specifically it is about religious belief that in a “free” market a Customer is a king. The belief that translates into budgets across multiple industries, from advertising to IT, which rivals GDP of some countries in it’s size.

After my Internet service was restored, and I regained my composure and my normal blood pressure level, I decided to “punish” this incompetent company, that does not appreciate value of my loyalty and power of the consumer. Before investing my efforts into sharing with the world my terrible experience, I decided to check how many people already share my opinion. The Google search “I hate Comcast” yielded about 20,000 results with this one on the top:

I’m hoping that my little post about how much I hate Comcast will bubble up high in Google rankings and that SOMEBODY at that company might think about improving their customer experience. It’s all about the power of the customer, baby. Might as well stop spending millions on smiley-face advertising to get new customers, because  the viral nature of the blogosphere is guaranteed to counteract it.

It is educational to note that this post was published in February of 2005, and at the time the author cites 2,100 results for the same search, therefore Comcast succeeded in growing it’s hater’s club at astonishing 6,000% in just over 3 years. The subscriber growth at the same period certainly cannot compare to this number, but it is a lot more tangible, since subscribers pay their monthly bill, but haters …Aha! Unhappy customers, whose opinion doesn’t seem to make the offender change their practices to improve customer satisfaction, cancel their contracts and “reward” worthy competition! Wrong again! There is no broadband ISP competitor available in my area (SF East Bay) to reward.

Based on this experience it would be logical to conclude that ISP does not operate in a “free market” environment, and the regulated market environment diminishes the power of consumer.

Humanity turns to a religion when our ability to be satisfied with a reason fails and we meet with a paradox which cannot be accepted without help from faith.

The alternatives are very inconvenient. I consume, therefore I am.