16 Reasons to have a CRM Strategy for the next 10-20 years

"I found several articles about the Millennials and their characteristics and that leads me to try to identify how the CRM should be for them. Hope you enjoy reading it."

Content

Abstract

The corporate CRM Strategy for the next 10 or 20 years should address the millennials challenges. In this article I share some reasons why the following IT projects should be part of the strategy as action plans:

Customer Single Point of Reference: a MDM project to unified the customer personal data and use it as corporate reference.
Customer Web Profile: one or more Web sites where the customer can log-in, update her or his personal data and check all the business information related to she or he.
Partner Single Point of Reference: a MDM project to unified the business partners and its contacts data.
Partner Web Profile: one or more Web sites where the partner can log-in, update her or his personal and company data and check all the business information related to her or his company.
Transactional Reference Store: an ODS project to store the customer transactions.
Corporate Data Warehouse: a DWH project for the organization.
Corporate BI: one or more analytical dashboards projects for the business units.
Customer 360º View: one or more customer centric dashboards projects for the business units.
Sales Force Automation: a CRM application that implements the sales processes.
Customer and Partner Service: implements the service processes in the CRM application either for the customers or the partners, and for every contact channel.
Mobile CRM: the mobile version of the CRM application.
Social Network Integration: integrate the CRM application with the social networks.
Customer and Prospects Segmentation: a marketing project that ease the campaign target lists creation.
Campaign Automation: a marketing project that allow the scheduled execution of campaigns through different channels.
Corporate Blogs: Web based blog-like sites that allows the organization and business units to share marketing messages and corporate news, and at the same time, that allows the creation of UGC by the customers.
Corporate Mobile App: a mobile application that will allow the customer not only to browse the products and buy, but to share comments and contents easily in the different social networks and the corporate blog, without leaving the app - this can be the corporate Web, optimized for mobile devices.

The adult Customer in the next 10-20 years

There are many studies and research on Millennials (the concept was coined by Neil Howe and William Strauss), and I don't want to go and try to explain what a Millennial is (or not), or why they are special for business and marketing. But, in my opinion, we should consider seriously some common findings on those studies, because in the next 10-20 years, the Millennial will be "the customer" for many companies and a good CRM Strategy should be a long-term strategy. Actually, some millennials are already part of your Customer base nowadays, and if your CRM Strategy is not customized for them, you should keep reading.

The future adult Customer is a person that is tech-savvy, well informed and is always using mobile devices (allow me to abuse and use the future and present indistinctly 😉).

The future Customer is a person that:

Trust strangers over friends, when they share information and experiences in "the social network" about your product, and he or she is making purchase decisions. But he or she won't take that opinion for granted, there will be a search on blogs, sites and mobile apps too.
Think about travel as a priority, and likes to share a lot while traveling by posting reviews, photos, and posts in "the social network".
Want his or her opinion to "be heard", because he or she share a lot. He or she expect answers and empathy to questions, comments, and complaints.
Can be very loyal to your brand, but he or she expect rewarding loyalty with promotions and discounts and by your company “being authentic.”
Is interested in taking part in the creation process of your products - has a desire to be creative - and do not like traditional advertisement, because he or she believes it is not authentic.
Is not aligned with traditions like marriage and home ownership (probably this was true 5, 10 years ago, but ...).
Prefer to rent a service than buying it (for instance, a car).
Wants to engage in group activities. Wants to dine, shop, or travel with friends and coworkers.

Take a moment and think about how are they described in general as buyers, and ask yourself how are or can be they as employees?, as co-workers?, as bosses?

Is a millennial around you at the office? How many are they? What are the drivers that keeps them in your company? Are they participating in the CRM Strategy definition?

Think also about this: does their behavior influence previous generations? Well, yes, it does.

As Customers, they do not want to buy just your product, they want to show they trust you and your company, and want to invest in that relationship.

There are some key business and marketing points here that we should take:

How to identify each customer is a must (information about "me", my personal profile).
Internet is a must.
Mobile is a must.
Social Networks presence is a must.
Customer Service is a must.
Blogs and blog-like sites are a very nice to have.
Social Networks influencers partnership is a nice to have.

The CRM Strategy should consider these generalizations and the Organization needs to build and implement a strategy that addresses millennial challenges, and considers their preferences, working together with Business and IT to ensure the tactical projects will achieve the long-term goal.

What should be the base of the CRM Strategy?

The CRM Strategy should have one main goal only: to make the Customer information a Corporate asset.

The information should be comprised firstly, of all the personal and demographic data about the Customer (that make sense for your business), and secondly, of all that data related to every kind of contacts and conversations the Customer has with you. The C and R in the CRM concept.
The information should be an asset, meaning that we have to carefully store it and be able to fetch it without any doubt that it is the one that belongs to "the Customer", and allowing us to manage it properly.

With this premise, the organization can have a good base to develop strong relationships with the Customers.

The strategy should come from the Organizational head office and involve the Business Strategy and the IT Strategy.

And the tactics should focus on allowing the Organization to share better messages, increase profitability in the sales cycles, improve customer loyalty programs, do better marketing campaigns, and improve the decision making process with better data analysis. To mention some important ones.

This is easy to say, but not that easy to implement. Let's face it, Business and IT not always see each other "as partners". The business is evolving faster, but IT has stagnated, is a point that stands out commonly.

Then the CRM Strategy must consider the alignment of Business and IT, in such way that they have to be focused on leadership working together towards the corporate goals and having accountability on the results. The strategy should allow them to define better the projects that are needed to reach the goals, provide faster response times and reduce or do a better management of the risks.

How the Business participate in the CRM Strategy?

For the Business, it is very common to define the strategy based on two main goals: get more Customers and beat competitors.

Most of the time, without fancy or a huge amount of technology, it is feasible. But be careful if you are not considering the value of your Customer base as part of the firm value, and that you are not considering long-term relationships with your Customers, because you are so focused in doing only tactical and short-term "crm" projects - yes, in quotes and small case -, like implementing a marketing tool to do email campaign without a good segmentation process in place, or something of the sort.

One important goal in the Business Strategy must be: how to become the owner of the Customer information and the responsible for its governance?, because it is not an IT sole problem, the accountability stays on the Business.

It is key that the Business should know how to answer clearly what is "my Customer"?, how to tell each Customer apart? and, how to manage the contacts and interactions with the Customers?

From a technical point of view, the "hows" should be agreed with IT, but there is more than the technical perspective in the sales process, and the Business know it. Defining your sales strategy thinking about your Customer as asset is the best way you can define a path to customer-driven growth, and you have to trust IT to help you in the implementation of it.

To follow the CRM Strategy main goal, the Business should consider that the information is their responsibility, and IT should take responsibility on the asset, specially, with the characteristics of the Customer they will deal within the next 10 years. Having this mindset, the Customer will be a corporate asset from a financial point of view.

What is the IT architecture needed?

In order to support CRM, the IT Strategy should have one thing in mind: the solution may not be one product only.

To be realistic, there are many legacy applications and solutions in the organization that you cannot get rid of them just to buy or develop a CRM solution that will contain "everything".

But the CRM final solution has to fulfill 4 basic requirements:

The solution should support the Customer information as an asset.
The solution should ease the Business operation and processes.
The solution should ease the Marketing operation.
And the solution should allow deep data analysis.

1. IT support to Customer Information

Most of the time, IT is in a position where the data about Customers is spread among several places (DBs, spreadsheets, etc.).

The objective is clear, in some way you have to uniquely identified each Customer and determine which is which in each place.

In order to do this, the need for a single point of reference is a must, and there is a very known method to do this: it is the MDM process - Master Data Management -, which output will be a unified Client DB, let me call it the b2cClient. This type of solution should be applied to the business partners and its contacts information too, the b2bClient (what follows should be applied to this DB too).

Although, be careful, don't waste your time and money implementing it, if you and the organization is not committed to use the new b2cClient, and to integrate any other application or business process that deals with the Customer data with it.

The b2cClient should be the truth about your Customer data and will contain only one part of the Customer information as was defined above: the personal data and, maybe some of the demographic data too.

But, what about the second part of the Customer information? The contacts and conversations the Customer has with you? What about any other type of transaction with the Customer?

A well known solution for this type of information is an ODS DB - Operational Data Store -. You should ensure that you have all the Customer transactions and contacts loaded in this DB.

We have then two new pieces in the architecture which necessity will be more clear later.

2. IT support to the Business processes

At this moment, if you already have the b2cClient DB, the next step should be to find or develop an application that will allow the Business to:

Do the sales process from a single interface (Sales Force Automation).
Do Customer Service support (if possible, through any contact channel, like phone, email, etc.).
Work with it in a mobile device.
And integrate with Social Networks.

Those are basic requirements that will allow to fulfill part of the CRM Strategy needs, but there will be two main technical requirements that the product should fulfill too:

Simple to develop or configure, maintain and evolve.
Be able to easily integrate with your legacy systems and other third-party applications.

I don't think that this type of solution should be developed in-house nowadays. There are several very good third-party solutions that provide these capacities, and it's not my objective to describe them, but, in order to pick one, you also have to take into account how the third-party develop and provide its own product, i.e. Do the provider develop a new version often? Is it easy to upgrade? Is it easy to get support? Is there a SaaS version of it? Is there a mobile version of it? etc.

The first set of data that will be "loaded" to this new CRM application should be the b2cClient, and it should be the first integration point too. With this in place, we have a good starting point to work towards our CRM Strategy goals.

3. IT support to Marketing

Again, a third-party application is the best option to help the Marketing operation. And this type of solution should be selected on the base that it can be integrated with your CRM application and also with other elements in your architecture.

But marketing is not only one application, it should be an strategy that allows the organization to reach the Customer in every channel, and every device (including mobile). With messages that shows the authenticity of the Organization and campaigns that are personalized.

Hence, the support that IT can provide to Marketing, will come from the ability to identify each Customer by a personal profile, to do segmentation of the Customers and prospects, to allow lead scoring, allow campaigns through blog-like channels and Social Networks, allow automation campaigns, etc.

The more this type of solutions or functionalities are integrated with elements like the MDM, the ODS, the DWH and the CRM, the better that the Marketing team can reach a personalized marketing stage.

4. IT support to Data Analysis

The standard solutions to do data analysis are the BI Analytics Applications that will depend on a well constructed Data Warehouse DWH, hence, this piece in the architecture is needed.

The DWH should be integrated with the MDM and ODS databases, and you should think of it as a source for your CRM application too, because some Facts in the DWH might be useful for the Business to have them in the CRM application.

In relation to the CRM, the DWH is the place to merge the Customer data with other data in your organization, with external data too, and to have the actual Customer 360º View.

And if you are considering to do predictive analysis, you should include solutions for Big Data, Data Mining, Statistical Analysis and Predictive Modeling.

The IT Strategy for CRM

It is not easy to find a third party CRM solution that allow us to do everything above, let alone, to develop your own application.

You have to ask yourself if you need a third party CRM solution only (that will contain everything) or is it OK to have a good CRM solution that can be integrated with the legacy applications and other applications within the architecture.

And the strategy, beyond the pieces in the architecture, should consider too, the feasibility of other tasks or projects with the tools you have, because they will be requirements to come. Some of them might be:

Enable the creation of a personal profile for each Customer (to show them you heard and you are authentic, they need to feel you treat them as real persons). This will give the opportunity to control general and subscription permissions, like those for GDPR.
Enable a blog feature in your Web site or directly in the CRM application (if it is SaaS). Allow comments from Customers and prospects (a good way to capture loyalty, and allow them to find the "expert" opinion, because they want to express themselves, be heard, and learn from others. More than 70% of millennial uses blog content and reviews to get the information they need before they buy).
Do campaigns to encourage your Customers to share their opinions, on existing products or new products to come.
Create mobile applications that let Customers not only acquire your products but ease the way to share posts and pictures in the Social Networks, search for nearby recommendations, or search for reviews about your products.
Enable your CRM application or Web site to allow external business partners to work with your information. Not only resellers, but people like online influencers that millennials trust (do not concentrate all the effort in the traditional advertising model).
Optimize your Web site landing pages for mobile devices, optimize your CRM application for mobile devices too.
Monitor Customer feedback and respond quickly providing feedback on the changes made.
Segment your Customers not based on a stage of life, but on those customers that relates to a specific social identity, those that have an alternative lifestyle, followers of a social media celebrity, etc.
Integrate the CRM application with Social Networks like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Pinterest (as soon as a Social Network becomes popular, integrate it!).
Enable your Web site (or CRM application) to allow User Generated Content UGC (when your Customer create contents about your product, you have a social proof which can help to generate leads and build trust).

Resources and Acknowledgement

For Millennials, I did a reaserch in the following sites:

Wrap-up

I don't think that the projects that I show above are new ideas or unknown elements of a CRM strategy and architecture, but I do believe that because of the already known customer characteristics of the next 10-20 years, there is a very good compelling reason to focus the strategy actions towards these type of projects.

"...how you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose..."

Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation co-founder

"...the company without a strategy is willing to try anything..."

Michael Porter, Harvard Business School academic

Search This Blog

Salesforce is Point & Click