Marketing
W
hile many of us are still
discovering what our
new and incredibly expensive
CRM systems can do for our
businesses, EN caught up the
inventor of the world’s first
web-based CRM system to
find out what the future looks
like.
The Future
of CRM
EN editor Saul Leese talks to Peter Gillett, the
creator of web-based CRM who takes a glimpse
into the future
In the beginning
Minority Report
immediately springs to
mind, where the last thing
that Tom Cruise needed
during his stressful journey
was personalised video
bombarding him with every
step – so we don’t really want
that do we?
Let’s go back to how
all this started. My first
proper job was working for
a PR company owned by an
agency which subsequently
got purchase by Saatchi
& Saatchi; so quite a
sizeable affair. We ran
great campaigns, but my
frustration was that PR was
generating many more leads
than their highly expensive
advertising on joint current
projects, which led me to look
at ways of managing lead
tracking and reporting from
all forms of media.
Direct marketing was
the big thing in those
CEO of Marketpoint and Zuant, Peter
Gillet
days, so I looked west and
formed a partnership with
a company in Cedar Rapids
called AdTrack to provide a
global service for US clients
predominantly, such as 3M.
B2B leads in those days were
delivered by Magazine bingo
cards where pages and pages
of enquiries came through
which were hard for clients
to track.
So, this was our first foray
into what later became
database marketing. We
created a really neat system
capture enquiries into
different client data files and
generated printed A4 size
lead cards using NCR paper
so that the client sales teams
could return the Freepost
tear-off section to confirm
lead follow-up, value of sale,
close date - all the basics for
real pipeline evaluation!
This all took off pretty
quickly, so much so that
this led to me forming
Marketpoint to specialise in
Database Marketing in 1982
in the middle of the Falklands
War!
Jump forward 10 years and
we were starting to seriously
develop what essentially
were early CRM database
systems although the term
didn’t really start to emerge
until very late ‘90s. I clearly
remember reading about
this new invention of the
Internet in the Daily Mail
of all places, at about that
time, and saw the potential
for clients to have access
to databases all around the
world. This eventually lead
us to develop our first web-
based CRM system for Lucent
Technologies which we
launched at their global sales
conference in Lisbon in ‘97.
This actually worked really
well, but I clearly remember
endless presentations, which
I wish I had recorded, when
we were using screeching
modems to dial up for
live presentations, which
obviously took a little bit of
time to get a connection, with
the resulting comments by
prospects who said that this
Internet thing is never going
to catch on!
The big CRM flavour of
the week then was the Siebel
system which had been
brilliantly sold in as a ‘does
everything system’ to large
corporates for zillions of
dollars. And of course a ‘does
everything in one system’
sounds very attractive when,
two decades on, we have
zillions of systems doing
brilliant applications in their
own right but with very
little integration to get the
full effectiveness of a single
system.
Today
So, the next ‘CRM’ phase
must be the development of
really seamless integration
systems where you put
together all of your carefully
selected niche software
applications to be viewed as
one system, and critically,
sharing the same data.
So, back to the present,
where are we with CRM
today? Unfortunately, not in
a very good place for three
simple reasons:
1. Lack of clean, managed
data with an ongoing
programme to enhance
the quality and volume
of records for each target
market.
2. Old fashioned, clunky user
interfaces which sales’
people can easily decide to
ignore and not use.
3. And the aforementioned
lack of integration with
other systems such as
Call Centre, Marketing
Automation, Content
Management and Mobile
Apps, means that central
CRM data soon becomes
historic and out of date.
The future
The next really interesting
aspect of course is AI, and
listening recently to some
of the synthetic human
voices used in the latest call
centre software has already
convinced me that it won’t
be too long before we can
have a much better quality
of conversation with a robot
than you can with a Level 1
call centre agent who has a
limited script and no power
to make any meaningful
decisions which we all
know is often a real cause
of immense frustration!
November — 35