Steve Fearon, Oracle: "The evolution of CRM to customer experience management is happening"

Posted by in Customer experience, Social CRM, Technology on Thu, 19/01/2012 - 02:20

Oracle's Steve Fearon explains how organisations can build a customer-centric brand through effective customer experience management.

 

 

 

2011 was a big year for customer experience management (CEM). As highlighted in our recent article,CRM lessons from 2011, customer experience was everywhere - it was on our TV screens as Mary ‘Queen of Shops’ Portas produced ‘Secret Shopper’; it was in our bookshops with the likes of Shaun Smith (with his book ‘Bold’) and the SAP team of Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer , Volker Hildebrand (with ‘The Customer Experience Edge’); and it was on the minds of the CRM vendors, notably with Adobe announcing its entrance into the CEM space, and Oracle's headline-grabbing acquisition of RightNow.

“The customer experience has always been the core of customer relationship management (CRM), but what has happened is that it’s finally being realised that it is actually not only a theoretical core, but it also needs to be the focus of what companies do when it comes to CRM,” Paul Greenberg, author of the seminal CRM at the Speed of Light and president of The 56 Group, told MyCustomer.com recently.

Steve Fearon, vice president, applications sales development, alliances & CRM On Demand EMEA, shares his take on it.

"Customer relationship management is the corner stone of a customer-centric approach, but the brand needs to be able to address the customer expectations during cross channel processes, we are seeing the evolution of CRM to customer experience management," he explains.

And according to Fearon, this encompasses some of the hottest topics in the business arena, such as social CRM.

"CEM incorporates many channels, for example social CRM, which offers the means to understand where, what and which conversations are happening, and how to engage in conversation. Social CRM can be used for engaging internally within a sales team, as well as externally with the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment.
 
 
He continues: "A successful social CRM strategy for sales requires much more than access to social information about prospects. It requires a fundamentally different selling process. B2B companies need to leverage the vast volume of customer data and insights, but how the data is aggregated, transformed into intelligence and integrated into the sales process are the primary factors in determining the success of a sales organisation 'going social'."

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