Q&A with Art Hall - CRM Association
By Jeff Hilimire on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007Art Hall is currently a management consultant at Alvarez & Marsal, President of the Atlanta Chapter of the CRM Association and was recognized as a 2007 Customer Champion by 1tot1 Magazine where he was the VP of Sales & Customer Care at NetBank in Alpharetta, GA. He’s also someone that each fantasy football season attempts to compete against me and each season fails miserably at that 
I recently had the opportunity to ask Art a few questions about his thoughts on CRM.
Art, CRM seems to have many meanings depending on who you ask. How do you define it?
I define CRM as an organization’s responsibility to “proactively” manage a customer relationship on a one-to-one basis. I use the word “proactively” because the three customer value levers are for an organization to “know them”, “hear them” and to “help them.” While the basis of the relationship may start off reactive (i.e. collecting the initial understanding of the customer) over time an organization should have the customer intelligence, visibility, insight and agility to predict customer behavior over the course of a customer lifecycle. Conspicuously absent from my definition is any reference to technology though technology is an enabler for organizations to achieve such agility.
I like that you kept technology out of the definition of CRM. Obviously technology has had some impact on CRM initiatives, in your opinion what has been the biggest change that technology has made in CRM?
This is a tough question Jeff because I think there are several “big” changes that technology has made in CRM. For one, we are seeing off-premise and “hybrid” CRM models come into play as an alternative for organizations that do not want to invest in an “on-premise” model. We are also seeing the rise of on-demand CRM which Salesforce.com is recognized as a market leader. Now, we are seeing Open Source CRM models which allow the CRM software and its source code under an open source license to study, change and improve its design. SugarCRM, for example, is a CRM solution provider that is making huge waves in the CRM space and providing a flexible alternative for many organizations looking to deploy a CRM application. So, I guess the biggest change that technology has made in CRM is flexibility.
Many people say that email is the web’s killer app. Would you say it’s the killer app of CRM or is there something else in your mind that fits that moniker better?
I don’t know if I would say email is the web’s killer app. It is only the killer app if an organization is taking the results of email campaigns and feeding it back to a central data warehouse and the organization is taking the results to learn and improve regarding which email campaigns work with each customer segment or personas. Email is certainly cheaper, but with SPAM control nowadays I wonder how effective the marketing reach is on an aggregate basis.
Which companies seem to do the best job overall with customer relations?
In my experience, I love the Ritz-Carlton. I was blown away how they knew my name and I never stayed at the hotel before until this past February. Wachovia has done a nice job in customer relations over the years; it will be interesting to see how their customer satisfaction holds up on the heels of their announcement of off shoring a lot of their customer facing components to India. Wachovia seems pretty confident they can deliver.
Now I get to put you on the spot, which companies seem to do a very poor job with customer relations?
Ok Jeff, you are really pushing it. I HATE DELTA’S SPEECH ENABLED IVR!!!!! I don’t like the BP Gas station on the corner of I-77 East & Gateway Corporate Boulevard in Columbia, SC. I was going to drop kick an employee there last year for bad service. I have mixed feelings towards Apple. I used to hold them in high regard for customer relations but encountered an experience recently where I felt like they were trying to get me to move to a new version of an iPod instead of fixing the one that I had.
Art,
Thanks for focussing on an aspect of CRM that many organizations are “cost-rationalizing” to the detriment of their customer’s loyalty and life time value - the call center. No technologically avanced CRM model can overcome the negative impact of a poorly handled customer care call. I know, I was in wireless for years - notorious for horrific customer care. I also recently ran the consumer affairs call center at GP, so know that very few organization are turning these critical consumer encounters into relationship gateways. A company who does a good job, though, is Good Answer - Coke’s response solution (which they also source to customers and other companies).
You mentioned Wachovia moving many customer-facing components to India. Certainly this is nothing new for big business. Many mid-large sized business have been moving call-centers to India for the tremendous cost savings, and all make these decisions feeling confident they can deliver (fwiw, my personal experience w/ overseas call centers has been mixed). I wonder what kind of research these companies regularly conduct to compare and contrast customer satisfaction after moving call centers overseas - and to continually rationalize their continued investment overseas? As Dan suggested, you must assume there is a point where “up to” a specific dip in customer sat is acceptable for the cost savings.
Art - how do you find companies are responding to customers concerning the negativity associated with moving call centers overseas?
Art, it’s refreshing to hear an industry expert relay that technology is not the “fix all” for customer relationship problems within companies. There are a lot of issues technology can fix, but the last thing you want to do is take a broken process and enable it with technology. You just get to the bottlenecks and broken processes faster! From my experience, the combination of good process, well trained(in relationship management) employees, and enabling technology in the right amount has proven to be the key to success for most CRM projects.
I am seeing companies do a number of things: 1) using customer feedback mechanisms to measure the perceptions & attitudes of customer experiences and using the results to make decisions to migrate call centers back domestically. Dell is an example of this.
2) My good friends over at Nexidia in Buckhead just announced Nexidia Language Assessor which tests the fluency and pronunciation in a specific language which augments much of the training around accent neutralization.
3) Some companies are not doing squat because frankly they don’t care about the customer and the attractiveness of short-term cost containment is too much to give up to improve the customer experience even though it is the CUSTOMER not the shareholder that is the scarce asset.
Go figure!
Ella,
I am starting to see that many of the CRM issues are more systemic cultural problems that can be fixed with strategy, change management and better processes. Technology may or may not come into the picture.
Like, I hate vendors that says “improve your first call resolution by 150%” implying that you can take their technology out of the box, plug it in to your organization and voila your first call resolution rate has improved by 150%. Do you know how many solution providers I want to drop kick based on that marketing message?!!!!!
Art, I agree that flexibility is one asset CRM technology provides. I’d like to add another: information access. There’s nothing so powerful as giving customer-facing employees — and customers — access to the right customer information at the right time. And if the integrations are there, also giving those employees — and customers — access to the supporting back-end data (as appropriate, of course).