Customer Relationship Management

Missile Command used to be a lot easier before everyone had missiles.

The problem was always simple.  AcMo needed a method to help new customers find us while also being able to evade current and/or former disgruntled customers.  I was naive when I thought that closing the complaint department would be sufficient.  The complaints still arrived like water bursting through the dam.  Nothing we did helped stem the flow or appease our angry clients.

Some of the complaints were probably justified, but there is a whole contingent that I suspect are only complaining because that makes them feel whole.  Their motivation is irrelevant because I couldn't do anything about them anyway.  The board has restricted me from addressing customers directly.  Besides, we only crash tested one client’s vehicle to destruction.  That isn’t a basis for a class action lawsuit.

Customers can be needy, clingy, abusive, but worst of all, slow to pay their invoices.  All of that other stuff is inconsequential, but the situation becomes real the moment customers start interfering with AcMo’s revenue streams.  Is it surprising that AcMo is reluctant to get involved in a relationship with those types of people?  Making that relationship official by keeping records and correspondence and data seems foolish.  Everyone knows if you have something to hide you keep it in your personal emails.

I was under the impression that CRM was designed to fulfill our dreams by identifying and removing all of our undesirable customers.  It turns out that it doesn’t work like that at all.  As far as I have been able to understand it, CRM is useless unless you want to count “eyeballs”.

What?

We tried to follow all of the steps in the diagram, but we kept getting hung up on step 1.  Customers are a major stumbling block in all of our initiatives.  If we could just figure out a way to eliminate them from the process, we would be more efficient and happier.  During our earlier development years, we used to forward complaints we received to our competitors.  It took a bit of editing to make it look like it was actually addressed to our competitors, but those customers were determined and eventually found their way back to us despite our obfuscation.

We ran with this concept for a long time as well, but we found it impossible to keep raising rates for happy customers.  In the end we settled on the best kind of customer amelioration plan:  we drop giant shark heads on top of the most vociferous complainers.  That has the added psychological impact of demotivating the casually upset.

Those cold, soulless eyes have seen things, bad things.

Maintaining an adequate supply of these giant shark heads is difficult, but not impossible.  We exercise great restraint when using these weapons to maintain inventory at sustainable levels.  Consider the consequences of complaining too much—or at all—about AcMo’s products and services.  Those shark teeth cause a lot of damage.