The new roles shaping the world of customer relationship management

Jobs boards are bursting with advertisements for customer relationship management positions. So what roles and skills are in demand - and what new job titles are appearing?

By Neil Davey, editor

There was a time when a job in the 'world of customer' meant either working in sales, marketing or customer service. How times have changed! As the sector has morphed and expanded over the past decade or so, we have seen an increasingly diverse portfolio of job titles appear on the corporate roster.

Most significant, perhaps, has been the emergence of dedicated heads of customer relationship management (CRM). A recent study by GI Insight suggests that one in five (19%) of top UK corporations have now appointed a head of CRM – up almost a third on the figure two years ago. The number of heads of CRM in total – including those that also have another role, such as customer services director or marketing director – pushes this number up to 48%.

"Internal branding is an issue for every company I work with and CEOs understand how important it is... One of the great untapped opportunities is to clarify and reinforce the internal brand."

Steve Yastrow

"CRM is now a universally accepted concept amongst marketers," says Andy Wood, managing director of GI Insight. "Since one-off CRM technology costs can be written off and ongoing senior people costs cannot, a company that puts CRM into the title of one of its senior managers is making a real statement of commitment to CRM. CRM initiatives have been taken, hard bottom-line results measured, and ongoing metrics put in place, before CRM management is afforded senior status."

An area of customer management that is somewhat newer to jobs boards is customer experience. A few years ago 'customer experience' was the latest buzz word. Then it became an important item on the business agenda. Now its evolution is complete, and it is not uncommon to find it physically manifested within the organisation in the form of a customer experience manager or similar role.

Elevated to the boardroom

Joe Slavin, chief executive of Fish4 who heads up Fish4jobs, believes that this role will become increasingly common as the economy worsens – and may even be elevated to boardroom level. "It is a fashionable title at the moment, but as the economy starts to tighten it will become a lot more fashionable," he explains. "When you’re growing as quick as companies have been over the past five years you don’t have to think too much about the customer because if you lose one then you just go out and get another. But as the economy starts to slow down and bite harder for business it is more important now than ever that the customer relationship is catered to. You have to keep customers happy."

"It is nice to have someone who worries about the customer experience - particularly when companies can sometimes have a focus on things that are anything except a good experience – and it is nice to have this person with a chief in their title because then they sit at board level and have some degree of influence as to how the company conducts its business."

Another area that is blooming on the jobs boards is customer analytics. At last year’s Gartner CRM Summit, the research firms’ managing vice president Scott Nelson forecast that 2008 would see a significant skills shortage in analytics skills. Just where has this demand come from?

"Just five or six years ago we were doing 360-degree views of the customer and we thought we had our hands full getting all that information from the enterprise and making it useful to someone to service the customer," says Bruce Culbert, founding principal and managing director of BPT Partners, CEO of iSymmetry and all-round CRM expert. "Now there is 10 times more information outside the enterprise about the customer and the ability to tap this information that you didn’t obtain yourself is bizarre. There is more information out there than there ever was and the challenge is finding value in that information and making it actionable."

This explosion in customer data has seen demand surge for a variety of analytics-related skills. "There is the gathering, the assimilation, the cleansing and the bringing together of that information – which tends to be more technical skill," continues Culbert. "And then you have the 'what do I make of this information' part, which is more of a strategic skillset. And you probably won’t find the same person to do this."

"If I was going to school again, analytics is definitely an area I’d study!" Slavin adds.

Social networking and beyond

Also related to the customer experience field is the growing demand for company figures that oversee internal branding exercises in a bid to ensure that customers receive a consistent company experience and brand message across all channels. As a leading light in customer experience, telco Orange has an internal brand manager on its roll call, and a growing number of firms are sure to follow suit.

"Internal branding is an issue for every company I work with and CEOs understand how important it is," says author, speaker and consultant Steve Yastrow. "But at the same time, they don’t know what to do about it and they have nobody to delegate it to except the training department. And that is not enough. One of the great untapped opportunities is to clarify and reinforce the internal brand."

Whilst titles such as head of CRM and customer experience manager and roles in analytics have been features of the jobs market for some time, there are new roles emerging and skills in demand that are shaping the present and future of the customer management sector, and many of which are emerging out of social networking’s primordial soup. Sensing this trend, Culbert – along with Paul Greenberg and Ted Hartley – recently launched myCRMCareer to provide CRM pros with the opportunity to develop their Web 2.0 skills.

"New jobs are emerging in this area, and emerging quickly," says Culbert. "You have demand for social media specialists, who have similar qualities to marketers or editors, but they are the folks who do internal blogs or report on blogs. There are interaction engineers – someone who engineers multiple touchpoint interaction. I was on a panel the other week and I was introduced to a social tag expert. His job is to do experimentation on social tagging, identifying what people are interested in by their social tags and enabling the delivery of more contextually appropriate messaging."

Corporate blogs are now increasing in prominence and a recent Forrester Research report – 'The ROI of Blogging: The Why and How of External Blogging Accountability' by analysts Charlene Li and Chloe Stromberg – concluded that: "As blogging becomes more visible - and expensive in terms of both time and money - supporting blogging with informal budgets and borrowed resources just won't cut it."

Kieran Potts, managing director of internet marketing and web development consultancy NeverMind agrees that the days of palming blogging duties off onto an unsuspecting employee are over. "Blogging is very dependent on being good at writing and there are a lot of blogs out there that aren’t very well written and therefore not very easy to read," he explains. "Companies either have to employ a journalist to write their blogs on their behalf or at least have someone educated in blogging before they go live."

Corporate blogs have also inspired the emergence of other, related job roles. "Companies are actually hiring people to monitor blogs and then create messaging in response to them - but in a stealth way," says Culbert. "So instead of going to a blog and responding directly to an inaccurate representation or a bad comment about a company, people can blog somewhere else and counter that, and make it look like they aren’t directly responding to that situation."

New skillsets

So it would seem that the world’s job boards won’t be short of careers from the world of customer management for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the general consensus is that the number of related jobs and skills demanded will only continue to proliferate. As the sector continues to mature and evolve, so new skillsets will be required to marry technology and processes, oversee customer interactions and generate value from customer data.

And how about the following two predictions for job titles of the near future:

"There is a marketing professional in charge of the marketing communications, but who is in charge of the employee as a piece of the marketing equation?" questions Yastrow. "The challenge is that many organisation are is so big and the staff are all in silos, each doing their one piece, and so it is all just sheer luck if it comes together as brand harmony. I see the need for a director of brand harmony role in an organisation that is able to look at all interactions the customer has and have responsibility for orchestrating how they all come together."

"I think that in the next couple of years companies will have people sitting on their boards who are responsible for networking - like a chief networking officer, or a chief connectivity officer," says Web 2.0 practitioner and author Leon Benjamin. "In fact, I actually even think that at some point in the next two to five years the Government will have a minister for this area, because this area is that significant now. Social netowrks have become part of the social fabric."

With the customer management sector continuing its evolution, it may only be a matter of months before we see director of brand harmony and chief connectivity officer on the jobs boards.