Outsourcing of CRM is becoming increasingly popular in times of economic recession, and not only in the midmarket. Outsourcing of course was already growing in popularity in general, even before the economic meltdown.
Especially outsourcing IT-related activities is popular, as well as for instance call centre operations. And although CRM is related to IT and to call centre operations, it is far from the same.
Outsourcing CRM is not without risks. A fundamental question is whether it’s a good idea to put your CRM in the hands of your marketing partner and if it is safe.
Of course there are some arguments for outsourcing CRM because after all managing customer relationships can consume a lot of time, money and energy (and in a customer-centric companies it really should but at the same time it does not HAVE to consume so much resources as many companies think).
Does the benefit of possible savings weigh up against potentially losing control over the conversations with your customers by trusting a partner or an agency to do it for you?
The answer depends on elements such as the type of CRM-related activities you wish to realize, your industry, the size of your company and whether you are more focussed on personal relationships (for instance in B2B) or on brand-related communication (like it is often the case for big consumer brands).
Since customers become smarter in recognizing advertising and decide more themselves how and when they wish to interact with companies, it can get difficult to gain knowledge on how to approach the ever more invisible customer.
But that still is not an argument to outsource all this to a partner. Instead, you might need a partner that helps you to get the conversations going again in this digital era where the rules of sales have changed and that helps you to guide your customers in and through the buying process.
In the end the aim should be to gap the bridge between your marketing, sales and CRM teams in order to get the right information to the right customers yourself, as much as your type of business permits you to.
‘Outsourcing or not’ should maybe be ‘outsourcing what exactly?’. And there are various criteria to answer that: what benefits our customers most, what do we want to achieve, what are the risks and benefits and maybe most of all: what is the ROI in the short run, but especially in the long run.
Jean-Paul De Clerck is a 360° interactive marketing consultant, founder of the Fusion Marketing Experience and owner of conversionation. You can connect with him via Twitter.
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