Customer Relationship Management: New paths to leadership
More than a decade of almost continuous prosperity was eclipsed almost overnight by a series of global economic pressures. While those pressures are abating, it is time for Marketing, Sales and Service executives to confront head-on some of the undeniable market forces raised by the downturn.
While already smart, consumers are increasingly savvy and demanding – continually challenging company expectations about products and services. They are leveraging the digital information explosion to reinvent their routines to research, shop, purchase and obtain service from companies. They are driving new forms of communications and new ways of gaining information.
Success for marketing and sales professionals in this new world will depend upon gaining insight quickly across the universe of places, things and people to transform customer experience, open new markets and reduce organizational complexity.
To do so will require them to choose among three levers for success – Cost and Complexity Reduction, Strategic Service Delivery and Innovative Market Making – to create a path that will enable them to become Customer Insight Leaders, Digital Channels Leaders or, in a best-case scenario, a combination of both.
To find out the steps to becoming a new-age leader in Customer Relationship Management, as well as other results from the 2009 IBM Customer Relationship Management Study, download "The path forward: New models for customer-focused leadership."
