Steve Yastrow commences on tompeters!: "A customer relationship is an ongoing conversation with your customer ..."
We carry on: ... implemented as a sequence of touchpoints meandering between off- and online/ internal and external/ coincidence and marketing, such as (from the customer's perspective):
- A friend you meet in the gym wearing his new iPod shuffle
- A hardware review you find Web 2.0-like via Google and digg.com on ars technica that same evening
- A promenade to Apple Store, Bellevue Square or a click into Apple Store, Switzerland
- A friendly sales clerk or a usable shopping cart/ check out procedure
- Instantly adding (in both cases) a Griffin Tempo Sport Armband as you consider sky-diving as an alternative to the gym starting next summer
- A thank you email with a support link
- Yourself, posting the question "How can I split my iTunes library across a Windows Vista laptop and an external harddisk?" in Apple Discussions
- With an explanation from an Apple support specialist (in the forum and per email notification) an hour later
- A visit of the Jonathan Ive exhibit in London during a holiday whetting your appetite for more Apple(s)
- A follow-up call/ email six months later: " Would you be interested in switching to the future of TV with an Apple TV?"
- An up-sell to Apple TV offline or online (cp. 4 above) etc.
Who is in involved in the relationship from the organization's point-of-view? Apart from the sales clerk and the call center agent, there are
- The engineers who decided that the shuffle has to have "Clip and Go" to be wearable in the gym right out of the box
- The collective of quality-obsessed Apple employees who made the positive blog review of the product possible
- The interior/ experience designer of the Apple Store, Bellevue
- The user interface/ user experience specialists behind the Apple Online Store and Discussions
- The engineer who programmed the thank-you mechanism and the copywriter of the email
- The person who decided that iPod and iTunes should be two sides of the same coin, hard and soft respectively
- The support specialist scanning the discussions
- The London Design Museum
- Jonathan Ive
- A CEO with a long-term vision.
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Technology can't build relationships, its just a tool that you can use, with great effect, to help you organise yourself. I believe, and I think its Steve's point too, that far too many of us confuse the "process" with the "tools", which is why when asked, most managers will define CRM in terms that lean heavily on the use of words like "software", "application", "system", and "database".
I picked this up on my blog and my view is there.