Interaction Management

The ‘Art’ of Interaction Management

Many large business-to-consumer organisations have invested an enormous amount of effort, time and money into Customer Relationship Management in the last twenty five years. What do we have to show for this collective enormous investment?

The investment has had three major waves, firstly the data warehousing band wagon, then the CRM records management wave and then the Marketing Automation wave. A lot of these large investments have failed and there are now a lot of CRM 2.0 initiatives underway where we try and learn from our previous mistakes.

If having data wasn’t sufficient and having a consistent record management system was not sufficient to ensure success of our CRM initiatives what exactly was missing? The answer would appear to be the “R” in CRM. Our data gathering and records management have not led to the creation of a real relationship between the enterprise and the consumer. The key reasons for the lack of a relationship can be summarised quite simply with the following short story (thanks to Matthew Elsom):

E: I want to go for a beer tonight. C looks like a good prospect for this. I will compose an email to him.

E: Oh hey that is C calling me just now. “Hello C”.

C: “I am just phoning to give you some bad news. We had a fire in the kitchen of our house. There is smoke damage throughout the house.”

E: “Sorry to hear that. I hope everyone is okay”

C: “Yes everyone is fine. I have to find them some temporary accomodation so I am chasing that up now. If you need to get hold of me I will be on my mobile.”

E: “Okay. Say, would you like to go for a drink tonight?”

C: “WTF? Were you listening to what I just said? Catch you later.”

This story appears really strange to us. It doesn’t sound like a “normal” conversation between two individuals who know one another. This doesn’t sound like a conversation as part of a relationship. Why does E not pay attention to the information that is presented? Why does E continue to pursue a goal which is clearly not helping the relationship?

Now think about the dialogue above and replace “E” by a typical Business-to-Consumer enterprise and “C” by a typical consumer. Now the conversation does not appear to be so odd - in fact it is typical of the consumer experience common today. In fact the conversation often continues in the following way.

E: I want to go for a beer tonight. C looks like a good prospect for this. I will finish this email I was composing to him.

C: Oh look an email from E on my phone…. What? What?

Again this is not untypical of large B2C organisations to follow goals that they wuld not follow if they used all of the information available to them at the time.

Why has this happened?

• Marketing has become more automated
• There has been a proliferation of channels on which interactions take place
• Sales through service is a common cost deflection technique
• Channel deflection - moving from expensive manned to automated channels is a vogue
• Channel proliferation and the fact that every business unit is a “marketer” has led to to a bombardment of the “best”, “most valuable” customers to the organisation.

What can be done?

The answer that a lot of organisations are turning to is Interaction Management supported by Best-Next-Action decisioning. Interaction Management is the consistent and coordinated application of business strategy into every customer interaction.

Keys to success are in strategy, people, process and technology - the combination of these and the way that these are applied can lead to successful interaction management solutions for a fraction of the cost that the previous investments have cost - without throwing away your investment. Incremental investment only.