Moving Toward CMR

Customers have shown they don’t want to be hunted like prey. They don’t want to be managed; they just want companies to make their lives easier and less stressful. They’re not removing their names from mailing lists for defensive reasons. Rather it’s an offensive lifestyle management tactic aimed at reconfiguring and improving—not severing—their connection with marketers.^[8]

The time has passed for customer relationship management, which has been trying to make business better for the company. It’s time to recast the discipline of CRM as one of greater customer empowerment. Customer management of relationships (CMR) makes doing business better for the customer. As a business strategy, CMR requires management change, not change management. CMR also requires operational and process changes that will allow the company to respond to individual customer’s needs. Within your enterprise, CMR will touch every business and cultural area, every human relationship, and every technology.

CMR is not about launching yet another campaign, and it is not about formulating one more promotion. It is much more, even, than the sum of database marketing, targeted advertising, collecting information about customers, and offering new services. It is about creating an experience, personalizing the interaction with individual customers in ways directed by the customer, and thereby developing relationships.

Paul Greenburg, executive vice president of LiveWire Inc., talked about this customer empowerment in CRM at the Speed of Light: Capturing and Keeping Customers in Internet Real Time (McGraw-Hill, 2001): “What is empowering is not forcing customers to do anything they don’t want. Let the customers tell you what they care about.” The new CMR is a process of turning power over to the customer: allowing the customer to tell us what she’s interested in and not interested in, what kind of information she wants, what level of service she wants to receive, and how she wants us to communicate with her—where, when, and how often.

And customers will tell us what they care about. According to a 2001 survey sponsored by Teradata, a division of NCR, 80 percent of Americans are willing to share personal information with companies if it means getting more personal service. Sixty percent of those surveyed said companies that provide personal offers combining online and offline information about their shopping preferences offer an advantage that “makes life easier.”^[9] But customers will be disappointed if they never see a benefit from the information they give. If you are asking customers for sensitive information and aren’t putting that information rapidly to use to make their lives easier, stop asking those questions. Collecting information that may some day prove useful is not just bad CRM; it is the opposite of what CRM should be.

CRM	CMR
The company is in control	The customer is in control
Makes business better for the company	Makes business better for the customer
Tracks customers by transaction needs	Understands customer’s unique
Treats customers as segments	Treats customers as individuals
Forces customers to do what you care about	Lets customers tell you what they believe they’ll want
Customers feel stalked	Customers are empowered
Organized around products and services	Organized around customers

^[8]Direct/Yankelovitch survey presented at the National Center for Database Marketing Conference, Philadelphia, August 2002.

^[9]Sheryl Nance-Nash, “Let Them Lead,” Direct, May 15, 2001, p. 50.