Hi Paula,
Personally, I believe part of the problem is that there are too many parts of an organization that are responsible for customer relationships, not too few.
Scratch any organization and you've got PR, marketing, sales, customer service, delivery, operations, and product development that all at some point will be talking to the customer (and probably not talking very much with each other.)
Each area tends to be a silo in all but the very best organizations: Once a sale is complete, it's up to the delivery and ops people to make it work. When something breaks or there are other problems, then customer service is brought it. And so on...
Today's new generation of products, where are much more experential and relationship-based are even more dysfunctional in such an environment.
Social CRM holds the promise to solve some of these problems, often by letting the customers work amongst themselves to resolve them but also by forming a deeper relationship with company workers themselves. Social tools are inherently cross functional and will cause business silos to begin collapsing in many orgs, mostly for the better.
So I can agree with you that businesses are actually mostly good at managing relationships in the moment, but horrible - as you say -- in the long term.
Best,
Dion Hinchcliffe
Discussion on:
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