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CRM is Dead - Long Live Self-Service!

Sat 06 May 02006 11:17 AM
Business
4 comments

Seth Godin reports:

Disney Destinations Marketing has a new department:

Customer Managed Relationships

Here’s the quote from them that Tim shared with me, “CMR is our version of CRM - just a slight nuance regarding our philosophy that our guests invite us into their lives and ultimately manage our presence/relationship with them.”

CMR sounds a lot like the self-service vision I first wrote about two years ago:

How could [mobile phone operators] improve their customer service? My suggestion is via self-service, whereby I can connect into the operator via the phone’s browser, and select an option I want to enable. That’s it; no phone calls or real human contact involved.

I guess I need to work harder at generating acronymic puns, but at least the concepts behind the ideas are catching on at businesses of all sizes.

Tags: business, cmr, selfservice

TP wrote at 12:07 PM on 07 May 2006

Guess it depends on the customers and the business. Many of our customers want a human because they don’t trust the automation – even though it may be more reliable sometimes.

dwlt wrote at 04:52 PM on 07 May 2006

I should point out that I do think a human should be easily reachable in some way, I don’t think that aspect of service will ever go away entirely.

Scott Gingrich wrote at 09:38 AM on 16 May 2006

I like the acronym "CMR"...good for Disney. And, yes, it does sound like self service. However, I don’t think self service presumes automation. Let customers choose from a buffet of choices, including human interaction…afterall, this isn’t about eliminating humans from the equation, it’s about improving the human experience.

dwlt wrote at 10:43 AM on 16 May 2006

Scott: I do agree with that, but my main point is that human contact shouldn’t be the default option. There are many things which I should able to do via a browser, thus reducing support costs and my own costs in terms of becoming frustrated with touchtone mazes and call queues.

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This is the website of one David Thomson (aka dwlt) from Edinburgh, Scotland. It contains the results of my patented thinking-out-loud process.

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