Earlier this month I attended Gartner’s EMEA CRM Summit in London, where, I’m delighted to note, yet another RightNow customer won the Gartner CRM Excellence Award – this time for Europe, Middle East and Africa. The award is designed to highlight world-class CRM initiatives and share successes, challenges and insights.
This year the honour was bestowed upon thetrainline.com which wowed delegates by sharing how it transformed its organisation to become customer-centric. By listening to, and acting on direct customer feedback, thetrainline.com was able to make significant changes right across its business – all with the aim of improving the customer experience and providing their customers with effortless customer care. Agents were empowered to help customers resolve their query, rather than worry about hitting handling-time metrics, this change, along with other improvements to processes, products and services resulted in significant improvements to customer satisfaction levels as well as positively impacting customer registration growth and customer repeat spending.
Congratulations again to thetrainline.com which joins the ranks of other RightNow customers, EA, Overstock, eHarmony, Marktplaats and Nikon as Gartner CRM award winners!
On a side note; it was the conference’s 10th anniversary and as such, it was interesting to take stock of how far CRM has come in the last 10-years, and what opportunities still lay ahead. One session that particularly resonated with me was held by Michael Moaz in which he talked about how to satisfy the 2020 customer and how customers will have at their disposal a raft of CRM technology – social and otherwise –allowing them to dictate their relationship with an organisation. Successful enterprises will be those that can learn and use the customer behaviour taking place beyond their own sphere of influence to create a more collaborative, customer-led engagement. The key message I took away from the session is that organisations will have to double, and re-double their efforts towards becoming consumer-centric entities. RightNow has been a long-standing proponent of ‘the outside in’ approach to CRM – where the focus is on the customer’s experience (outside) rather that dictating to, or pushing customers through company-defined CRM processes (inside).
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