A recent poll of 450 global marketers by the CMO Council revealed that only 16% of all companies consider themselves to be effective or extremely good at customer relationship management (CRM). In a time when every company is looking for ways to do more with decreasing budgets and bolster the bottom line, CRM should be a key area of focus.

So why is CRM so difficult? We believe the answer to that question lies in the fact that it touches almost every facet of an organization. Integration and coordination in a marketplace where the only constant is change is, as the statisticians like to say, non-trivial. Add to that the difficulty most organizations have in accessing customer data and defining cost, and the challenge can seem insurmountable.

But CRM can be easy! Okay … easier. Barkley’s CRM group endeavors to make CRM strategies effective, successful and immediately impactful for our clients. While we readily admit there is no silver bullet, there are a couple of keys to ensure your firm is included in the 16% of companies with success in CRM.

You can’t afford to wait for IT.
One universal truth is that IT groups are resource and budget constrained. However, this does not need to be a roadblock. Barkley has a team of data experts that routinely works directly with our clients’ IT groups to quickly and economically take on all heavy lifting related to accessing relevant customer data (typically from disparate data sources) and putting it into a format to be accessed, analyzed and measured.

Pluck the low-hanging fruit first, then start climbing the tree.
Many companies today cannot answer salient questions about their customer base such as, “Which customers have the highest lifetime-value potential?” and, “What is the cost of customer churn to the organization?” In fact in the CMO survey, only 6% reported “excellent knowledge” about their customers. If you haven’t yet picked the low-hanging fruit, the good news is the information is quickly attainable and immediately actionable. Once plucked, Barkley can help focus on where to climb higher and answer questions such as, “How best to predict propensity of churn by customer segment? Which behaviors are precursors for future positive or negative actions? What key customer characteristics should we use for prospecting? Which communication activities are generating the highest incremental ROI? The lowest?” Regardless of where the opportunity lies, Barkley can quickly help ascertain key insights and turn them into profitable business and marketing decisions.

Engagement is a journey, but the customer chooses the destination.
At Barkley we’ve moved well beyond “one-off” communication strategies. We look holistically at the customer journey from pre-intention to trial, repeat purchase and loyalty, with the ultimate goal of making your brand irreplaceable. By understanding the journey from the customer’s point of view and engagement touch points, we can uncover optimization opportunities and behavior triggers to drive communication. But these opportunities are not determined by us. We find them through observing customer behavior and ongoing data capture via dialogue, where we learn more about the customer, leading to escalated personalization and relevance.

One-to-one is no longer a vision. It’s reality.
Fundamentally Barkley believes a one-to-one strategy, delivering a relevant message with a relevant offer at a relevant time and via a customer-determined communication vehicle, is quickly becoming an executable strategy in all media. E-mail has made the leap, and if you’re not personalizing your e-mails based on customer segments and behaviors, you should be. Mobile is the next frontier. And beyond that, we are on the cusp of being able to drive customer-specific video content, both online and to the household, at scale. Addressable radio is not far behind. Since we are a full-service agency, we can truly embrace a one-to-one philosophy in a media-agnostic way.

It’s not what you measure. It’s what you learn.
Measuring customer behavior is similar to predicting the weather: the variables are often hard to quantify, change frequently and are difficult to weigh fairly. The challenge is designing feasible, replicable, cost-effective tests. If you’re not employing randomization and controlled experiments today, you are missing out on keen insight into what truly works, what doesn’t and, most importantly, how to do it better in the next iteration. This testing and learning allows Barkley to optimize our client campaigns, discover fresh insights and maximize incremental ROI. We believe in this so much that we routinely put some of our own profit on the line to ensure we are positively impacting yours.

If your CRM strategy is underperforming, we’d like to help you get back on track. To open a dialogue, e-mail Chris Dickey, Barkley’s Senior VP of Customer Relationship Management, at cdickey@barkleyus.com or call him directly at 816.423.6400.