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CRM Advice from Booz Allen Hamilton, or, Someone's Pumping a Dry Well Here

I read this article on the idea of low-budget CRM because of the outrageous costs of CRM projects and I liked the premise:

We think it is possible to reap some, even many, of the rewards of CRM without buying a specialized software package. We call our method "Cheap CRM." It involves leveraging the customer data the company already possesses - and most companies already possess a lot more customer information than they think.

A few paragraphs later their grip on reality slips. Eventually they sound as clueful as winners of Darwin awards.

Most multinational companies have invested massively in mainframe enterprise resource planning systems. These have brought rigor to their sales administration, summarizing each month's invoices at a customer or business unit level, but they don't necessarily provide transparency in sales reporting, thus leaving the organization blind to the richness of transaction-level analysis. By downloading invoice data into a simple database tool such as Microsoft Access, however, company analysts can construct a revealing picture of the shape of the business. ... By subjecting this data to regression analysis, one can get very close to the heart of CRM: understanding the customer's propensity to buy.

Mainframes for ERP? We haven't discovered Unix yet? Download a multinational's invoice data in Microsoft Access? Regression analysis in Access? Is this 1990? The article continues with some talk about benefits of analyzing data and the difficulty of extracting data; really basic statements you can pick up at any BI vendor's web site. Maybe web sites are too avante garde for Booz Allen.

What's really sad is not that the authors are completely ignorant of business intelligence over the past decade. It's that one's bio reads "...vice president with Booz Allen Hamilton in Paris. An expert in leading strategy-based transformations..." and the other reads "...a principal in Booz Allen Hamilton's London office ... specializes in operational improvement along the supply chain, including sourcing, performance measurement, and demand management."

Exsqueeze me? This is from a VP in strategy and a principal specializing in performance management? Companies paying hundreds per hour should expect more knowledge than I expect out of my IT interns. I don't know which is worse: that they work at a premiere strategy firm, or that Strategy+Business published this.

So, yes to the idea of inexpensive CRM, no to a publication this laughable. I'm glad my subscription to Strategy+Business lapsed years ago. I'd hate to think I paid to read this. Link

Posted by Mark Saturday, August 20, 2005 12:49:00 AM | permalink |