according to research by Dr Brian Smith, it is more likely in areas of the market that are complex and/or turbulent.  So the current market for mobile communications may throw up more opportunities for actionable insight than the current market for confectionary.  Although in the latter case, turbulence in political and social trends is creating more insight opportunities.

• when data from different sources is fused to create a big picture eg customer behaviour data, social trends, attitudinal market research, feedback and econometric models.

“Customer insight is lost down the cracks between different customer information departments” Julian Berry, the customer partnerships

• in cultures where thinking is valued and given time, and where different thinking styles are melded together  eg lateral thinking, emotional intelligence and problem solving,

Thinking is the means of productions.  You can no longer have the situation where one person thinks and the rest follow orders.

• in learning organizations,  where the insight behind the current strategy is recorded and understood,  and there is an organized process of scanning information, turning it into relevant knowledge and challenging what is known in order to distilling insight.

Have you worked out where the best place for insight is in your market and organization?

The climate of 2009 will see the nature of CRM mutate from ‘what customers give us’ to ‘what we give customers; and get back’. The idea of providing value for money to customer ‘tribes’ will begin to dawn as communities are explored.  A notion quite distinct from the previous view of CRM as individual cross-selling and retention for shareholder profits.

“2009 is a big year for CRM and a big deal. Transformational might actually be more than a political term.” Paul Greenberg

Customers well understand their ‘premium’ status, and those who give their time and money to companies will want more back to solve personal requirements. Companies who helpfully seek to alleviate the emotional and practical issues of recession will build trust. If companies continue to take the profit from customer knowledge, customers will just opt out of relationships.

Reciprocity for mutual benefit - not only between company and customer, but between customer and customer - is a fundamental part of this new thinking. Here, North America, with its strategic use of social software and experiential marketing, definitely leads the way.

Organisations that see themselves as ‘service platforms’ and build facilitative skills will have tuned into the right wave length. Which is why there is a growing emphasis on new business models utilising both technology and partnerships. Stephanie Seakins, principal consultant at OgilvyOne Hong Kong stresses that Asian companies “are now prepared to consider new thinking in order to recover lost reliability and credibility.”

Other signs of the CRM mutation are a change from ‘customer management’ to the more co-creative ‘customer engagement’, and the popularity of sales through service - where service is an entree, rather than an afterthought, that leads to the provision of a personalised solution. If you don’t listen more carefully to your customers your competitors and other consumers will.

According to Paul Greenberg, US author of CRM at the Speed of Light, CRM in 2009 is about understanding, involving and benefiting customers, and I would agree that that is a good summing up - as long as profitability is also added on the end. The secret of corporate sustainability is the constant balancing of benefit between company and customer.

We were amazed to see that 9 in 10 call centres have introduced this practice, are in the process of doing so, or are currently considering making this shift. - CSO Insights, 2007 Survey on Call Centres

Sales through service revolves around a ‘conversation’, even if that is machine to human. That conversation can be kicked off by the company, but the approach is more often made by the customer when looking for a service.

Examples of StS are:-

• Key account managemers, whose role is to understand client’s needs and find solutions from his company. The best do this through personal conversation, like the IBM client manager for an airline who spends most of his time talking in the airline’s staff canteen.

• The Dyson field service team, who, whilst carrying out servicing in the customer’s home find out through conversation what issues and needs the customer has. They are well versed in all the products and connected to operations to put right any issues. Customers have been highly delighted with this ‘time saving’ service.

• John Lewis, who thought that leaving customers to browse was what they wanted, but customers thought staff were being aloof and unfriendly. After a 5 year sales through service programme, staff now acknowledge the customer, open up conversations, and close sales by matching product to need as closely as possible – even if it means selling a lower priced product than the customer had intended to buy.

• Amazon, who were founded on a sales through service philosophy.

• O2, who supply service contact centre staff with information on the customer’s risk of attrition, and the three best offers (sales or service) to make to that customer based on propensity modelling and the content of the call. Around 6% of their 50million annual calls now generate revenue, and customer satisfaction is reported to have risen.

All the examples emphasise that StS is not just about revenue generating sales, it is about exchanging value. That may be free upgrades, helpful advice, or customer care, in exchange for customer engagement, recommendations, valuable data – and yes, at some point sales.

The quick answer, is that across the globe customer relationships (we will call it CRM but mean the strategy not just technology) are the axis on which 2009 ‘battle plans’ will spin.  A view backed by an Economist Intelligence Unit global survey of 300 executives, which emphasised their belief that customers’ impact on growth will double over the next five years.  However, the world is unlikely to emerge from recession, as it went in.  The nature of CRM will have mutated, and the tectonic plates of competitive advantage will have pushed further towards Asia (and maybe Australasia) and away from Europe.

The strategy for 2009 will be a quest; to find customer segments with immediate value potential, and engage them with ‘new and improved’ value propositions.  Insight will be at a premium.  Current customers will be priority, but fluctuating export markets will kick off a worldwide hunt for opportunity.

Costs will be pared down, but it will be on extras and unproductive activity eg avoidable contact, rather than the ‘slash and burn’ of previous recessions.  Fewer twiddles and more good value basics will align price with consumer spending.  Opinion is that Europe stands in the greatest danger of ‘unfocussed’ price reductions, driven by a heavier regulation and compliance burden.

“A moment’s insight is sometimes worth life’s experience” said American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes.  When we think of insight we think of it as rare and valuable, discerning and perceptive;  a knowledge that transcends the superficial and gets to the heart of the matter, to find its inner character:  a character hidden to the less discerning.

Insight in the world of customers can be either ‘flashes of inspiration, or penetrating discoveries that can lead to specific opportunities’ like mining for diamonds.  Or, more usually, a deep understanding of the customer in the context of the market.  Insight is the ability to get into the customers head in a way that is valuable to the business.  The insight that customers think blue washing powder gives a cleaner wash than white, even though the chemicals are the same, is not that useful to a telecoms company, but key to a detergent manufacturer.

Insight unlocks the ‘secrets’ of the market underlining threats and pointing to opportunities.   Which indicates it has several other characteristics:-

• It should be useful, and actionable
• It needs to be ‘of its time’ and can include both hindsight (perception gained analysing the past, and foresight (perception gained from modelling the future).
• It is not obvious to others or easily found

“We have to accept that having ALL government services online by 2005 is not as good as having BETTER services online.  The only reason we should be doing any of this is if we can deliver better services.“ - Dr Ian Kearns, Head of the Digital Society Programme at the Institute for Public Policy Research (2002)

From Gershon to Varney

In 2005 a report I wrote on the public sector and concluded that

” despite assurances that the modernisation drive, currently focused through the Gershon Report, was to reallocate resources from back-office to front-office for service improvement, customers still seem to have a back seat - somewhere behind the back office”.

The advice to public sector then was to make eGovernment more effective by adopting new customer centric marketing techniques - rather than old mass market ones.  Looking at customer relationship management activity in the public sector this year, I believe things have indeed moved that way and changed for the better.

The focus for Government CRM initiatives is now the 2006 Varney report on service transformation.  But the real drive for improvement seems to be coming bottom up and particularly from non-central Government organizations like local authorities and the police.  At a recent conference the ‘man from the ministry’, sent to outline the plan, seemed distinctly behind the game.

” A target culture without a citizen’s perspective is intellectually and morally bankrupt.  Excellence in public services cannot be achieved by centrally driven targets and national league tables alone.” Julie Spence, Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire

“Companies that want to improve their service quality should take a cue from manufacturing and focus on their own kind of scrap heap: customers who won’t come back.” So begins the seminal article on customer loyalty, ‘Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services’ by Fred Reichheld and Earl Sassar in Harvard Business Review 1990

If customers today think that companies are more unfair to them than in the past then companies must accept they are not delivering value for money, that customers to not trust them to be ‘on their side’, and that their brand values need to be inspiring – not internal.

As the original loyalty theory by Reichheld said, feedback is the guiding voice for a systematic approach to building human assets. Loyalty is more relevant today than ever, 80% of customers will continue with a company to whom they feel loyal, especially the over 40’s and more educated, but understanding the ‘best customers’ to invest in is still the key. No one will ever achieve 100% loyalty, and not every customer is capable of it.

Back in the ‘way back when’, there used to be a little mantra about building loyalty, it still applies as a good engagement process, but we now have more tools to achieve it.

• Recognise me (but don’t force me to remember complex passwords!)
• Know me (but don’t be too familiar until I deem it OK)
• Act accordingly (by making life easier and solving my problems)
• Communicate (and listen)
• Respect and involve me (but don’t waste my time, understand my goals)
• Anticipate my needs (because you know things I don’t, that’s your value )
• Show you care (about me, and about society)
• Appreciate me (thank me for my business and involvement)

Pigeonholing consumers into lifestage as a start, is a pretty reasonable gauge for needs: Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’ still elicits wry smiles, whatever our age. But today’s ‘lover sighing like furnace’ is more likely to check his mistresses views on climate change before texting his ballad. For each generation has life shaping values, and astute companies must monitor these to guide their value propositions.

As the world enters a new economic stage, how are trends in cultural values playing out with different generational lifestages?

How are the ‘freedom protesting’ baby boomers approaching their retirement, will they differ from today’s austerity pensioners? How are generation Y coping with their mobile lives, and are emerging teenagers ‘hoodies’ or ‘greens’?

To start with differentiate between lifestage, values and lifestyle – all of which drive customer behaviour.

1. Lifestage – is based on demographics (age, and family situation). Young families naturally have different needs to young singles, empty nesters from older families.
2. Values – are what people aspire to and spring from two sources, upbringing and culture. Generational values are laid down in formative years and shape our life view, even as cultural values shift. For instance, how does the 60s generation react to the green values of today’s culture, and does this differ to the 80s generation?
3. Lifestyle – the way people actually behave given their environment.

For the report Bridging the Trust Gap which looks at how values are affecting different lifestages resulting in various lifestyles, click here.

So, on a recent trip to Ljubjana it was enlightening to watch Slovenian television showcase business leaders on its breakfast programme; it even appeared to give their salary, although I’m not entirely sure about that. The tenor of the pieces are obviously meant to inspire, giving career path, and an ‘ideal day’. Not quite ‘Hello Magazine’ style, but it could easily be given a gloss.

Apart from celebrity business people such as Richard Branson, Simon Woodroffe and Alan Sugar, when did I last see a ‘normal’ business hero outside the business pages of newspapers and journals in the UK? When did you?

Slovenia is a new country rising from the ashes of communist Yugoslavia; which itself was wrested out of the fatally tangled Habsburg Empire. Except for a short time under Napoleon, the Slovenes don’t seem to have had very much independence in the last 1000 years. Now, with around 2million people, the Euro, and EU development funding, they are seeking a purpose with competitive advantage and ‘feeling’.

Making business rather than ‘Pop Idol’ an aspiration for people seems a shrewd move. And there is evidence aplenty to show that distinctive business success based on a personal social responsibility is Slovenia’s zeitgeist. “Forward with nature” is their united mission covering everything from pre-fabricated motorway architecture, to ecological housing construction and a hospitality industry built around ‘wellness’ and ’slow-food’.

But I would say they still have one cultural disadvantage to overcome from their communist past - customer service. Real, honest, altruistic customer service woven into their shiny, new, green, designer businesses could well be a world beater for brand Slovenia.

At CallNorthWest’s directors debate on ‘Automation and Strategic Planning for the Future’ recently, Director Tim Kirby reminded the call centre industry that hearing your child was going to be a city trader would be wonderful news, whereas being told they were going to work in a call centre would be disheartening, to say the least. Yet in both roles they would spend all day wearing headphones to engage with people on the telephone in order to build up assets.

As companies return from India a little wiser, how to lift the image of the industry in the UK is taxing minds. On the expert panel with me at the event were Directors from Vertex, O2, arvato services, and Dimension Data. In the audience senior managers from SME’s, international companies and government pooled ideas - even a Government minister has promised an appearance at the next event!

Distilling all the thoughts the answer to this question is not easy and has several strands:-

• Beak the habit of micro management and spending excessive amounts of time reporting facts irrelevant to good service such as wrap up time and calls per agent; call answering is a poor proxy for customer service. Analytics are needed but should reflect customer outcome priorities, not transaction costs.
• Promote your strategic value. How does what you do meet company goals other than cost reduction? Where do you engage customers over the ‘customer journey’? For example, are you key to the renewal of service contracts. Do you detect customer attrition, or warm customers for cross-sales? If you don’t know your value how will others?
• Where is the future for customer contact in your organization? The call centre of today will not be around in 10 years time, and the changes will be driven by technology - real-time marketing, social software, virtualisation. Do you have a pilot team in place with IT and customer experts to experiment you way into the future of conversational marketing?

Paper on the past and future of call centres - Your call is important to us - prove it!