Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Dubner,

Metrics you use depend on your business and what's important for customers and your company.
So you have to decide what you are going to measure to find out customer experiences at different touchpoints.Therefore first determine important touchpoints.You have to measure customer experiences both good and bad ones.
If you specify your business it will be easier to come up with ideas as to what shoud be measured and how to do it.

Adam

Hi Dubner

Firstly, for a browse around the world of customer experience from a CRM perspective have a look at www.CRMguru.com, sign up so that you can access the member only areas and search for the term. There you will come up with a wealth of useful information, total waffle and some fascinating threads of discussions. Over 1000 at the last count!

What this will serve to illustrate is the point made by Adam and others that the value of the customer experience and in turn, its value to you is pretty dependent on your objectives, your starting point and your current strategies. If you haven’t described or tried to measure customer experience, you may well be able to infer it from what you call “Movement”. Whether you can deduce anything from your existing body of data depends on whether you have been recording it in the first place.

CRM systems suffered badly from the panacea effect (I’m a CRM practitioner and have been for 8 years) Stick in a CRM system and suddenly you can deduce behaviour and take actions to benefit yourselves (and, hopefully the customer). It doesn’t work like that in practice.

Old-fashioned database marketing was often as adept at deducing the value of the customer experience as long as it was confined to purchases. If you have a large enough database and have recorded all the purchases or even the enquiries from your customers, you can deduce some pretty useful metrics about the categories of purchasing behaviours from different classes of customer as defined by RFM database analysis. Have a peek at www.dbmarketing.com in particular Arthur Middleton’s article posted in:

https://www.dbmarketing.com/articles/Art104a.htm

I’m only sorry that I can’t select a particular article or survey to answer your question, but at the other contributors have said, “It all depends”

We typically spend a day trying to get a client to explore what they want to measure and more importantly, why. This often precipitates some pretty heated debates within the client’s management team – OK they’re not quite the fist fights I’ve witnessed when it comes to doing forecasting, but it does expose the paucity of thought that has gone into thinking just what you expect of your CRM system. The philosophy, management practice and all that software and hardware someone was brave enough to write an open cheque for.

The fact that you are asking such a question when you appear to already have some sort of system, coupled with the fact that you seem to have grasped the fact that CRM is not just a whopping big implementation of a package, is very encouraging. If you can supply further information in a subsequent posting once you have perused the info you requested, we’ll probably be able to come up with some more specific assistance.

There are some extremely experienced CRM people on this site (They are far too modest to describe themselves as experts) and whilst I have the greatest of respect for the CRMguru contributors, the site is so large (I’ve been a member from the day that Bob Thompson founded it) there are so many opinions there that you need to be a bit of an expert to sieve the wheat from the chaff. That, or have a bit of assistance or hand-holding!

If the company details are too sensitive for an open forum, please feel free to contact me off-site via my contact details, but I would prefer, for the benefit of all the contributors and readers of MarketingProfs if we could keep as much of the discussion on-site as possible.

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions