JT on EDM

Great comment from monkchips on twitter today:

the key to customer relationship management is to treat your clients as people rather than accounts. everything else follows from that.

Of course the challenge is how to make sure that all the people who work for you and all the systems your clients use do this. While you can invest in training and measures and corporate culture that says our clients are people not accounts, this won’t help your systems do so and may be unrealistic if you have thousands of potentially outsourced or loosely affiliated staff dealing with clients. Only a systematic attempt to manage the decisions you make about customer interactions can ensure that these decisions are all taken in a way that treats your clients as people. The other reason it is important to build this kind of treatment into your processes and systems is that you want to keep your clients loyal to your company, not to one individual.