Bain & Company has just released its new report on Management Tools & Trends 2007. The survey looks at the use of 25 different tools by senior management in companies across the world.
Customer Relationship Management and Customer Segmentation were the 2nd and 3rd most used tools, and both scored highly on senior management satisfaction. They also had the lowest defection rates (in terms of senior management stopping using the tools).
The tools with the fastest adoption growth rates were corporate blogs and collaborative innovation.
Interestingly, taking all tools into account, the more effort was put into using a tool, the higher the satisfaction rating.
The survey tells us a number of things: Firstly, that CRM and associated customer management tools are widely used and highly successful. Secondly, that senior management is expanding how it manages relationships with customers, both by having more honest conversations with customers (corporate blogs) and by inviting customers inside (collaborative innovation). And finally that you have to stick at using CRM if you want it to succeed. None of this should be news to us, but it is nevertheless reassuring to see it there in black and white.
What do you think? Are you using CRM and associated tools to the full? Or are you just pretending to be customer oriented?
Post a comment and join the conversation.
Graham Hill
This is a wonderful report, and well worth studying. It’s encouraging that CRM usage and satisfaction is improving.
However, it seems a stretch to conclude that high satisfaction means successful. For one thing, in the survey, Bain makes no attempt to define what terms like CRM, TQM, Balanced Scorecard mean–leaving it to respondents to use whatever definition it has to them.
Unfortunately, I suspect that most executives think of CRM as an IT tool, not a customer-centric business strategy.
But let’s not quibble, it’s still good news!
Bob Thompson
CustomerThink Corp.