CRM Investments largely maintained for 2009 - and should focus on retention and wallet share

Written by Ole Bach Andersen

Friday, 30 January 2009 12:50

To me yet another example of the need to focus on customer retention and social media:

In a press release yesterday from Gartner Group (read full pr here), Chris Pang principal research analyst at Gartner states that:

"The responses to this later survey indicated that, as expected, some budgets for CRM initiatives were negatively impacted, but, the latest survey results showed that their earlier budget allocations for CRM initiatives largely remained in place"

The press release also mentions that:

"...more than three quarters of respondents in Europe said they are planning to enhance their investments in CRM initiatives in 2009. These projects will focus on improving customer retention and increasing wallet share"

While this may make a lot of sense in the financial turmoil it is good to read that the priorities in the CRM are is still taken very seriously. However, my personal view is that the CRM initiatives will have to take a much more broader approach to customer relations than we have seen in the past.

While real interpersonal relations with customers can only be handled for key accounts or at least in low volume the companies have to consider how to enable dialog with all their customers. While this is impossible to do in person for corporations with huge customer bases the CRM systems must be extended to understand and leverage the power of social media and facilitate dialogue.

And while all the CRM vendors probably have initiatives and modules for the web2.0 world I have yet to see a CRM system that can actually handle the customer relation with focus on customer retention on the current social media platforms. They are still to corporate introvert in my opinion.

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