The digital CRM approach

The digital CRM approach

Nowadays, I’m in touch with some digital projects and the building blocks of these digital experience designs really attract my attention. I see that there is no clear guideline for these projects to be well-equipped. And that’s why I’m going to focus on “the should have’s” (*) today.

(*) “Should have” things because of the maturity state of digital experiences. We should at least have these...

Definition of "the digital CRM"

As I mentioned before about the web evolving through the creative-only land to functionally-creative land, now it’s time to have a clear definition of “the digital CRM”.

I see 2 approaches;

1. CRM extending itself to digital

(like the social CRM approach of Oracle, the social networking accelerator for MS CRM gives us some clue of this)

2. Digital experience extending itself to CRM

(which is more important for me and maybe the right land for the digital CRM)

So... We can define digital CRM as “the digital experience designs equipped with essentials (*) of relationship management in a data-driven manner”.

(*) These essentials (which I'll give a check-list later) maybe categorized like this;

• business objectives,
• data capabilities,
• competencies

Timeout:

Do you remember "Bring the love back" of Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, 2008. 

My review:

"Digital CRM approach will end the break-up. Agencies should take care of this approach."

OK, let's continue...

Essentials check-list

The most important guidance here is "the essentials of the relationship management" for digital experiences. Now, let’s analyze the essentials;

Business objectives

• Answers: You should have answers...
  
  
  • Why do we create this web presence?
  • What do we want our target audience to do?
• Micro/macro conversion points
• Conversion routes

The business objectives of the digital experience design will clearly define & give a direction to the relationship management between you and your target audience.

Data capabilities

• Data storage 
• Data management 
• Data discovery 
• Analyst 

The data stuff can be named as the web analytics capabilities but we should not mention these as something like software features, we should keep in mind this; 

“why are we going to use these stuff?”.

• It’s not important to have the data discovery capability,

      unless we have the search for insight in mind.

• It’s not important to have the data analysis capability,

      unless we have the discovery in mind.

• It’s not important to have the data management capability,

      unless we have the data analysis in mind.

• It’s not important to have the data storage capability,

      unless we have the data management in mind.

Yesss: why are we going to use it?

Competencies

• Messaging 
• Collaboration 
• Apps 

and so on.

Not every experience should be equipped with all of these competencies. It depends on your needs;

• If you design an experience to improve the loyalty,

      collaboration maybe a good choice for co-existence and interaction. 

• If you design an experience targeting WOM, 

      messaging & sharing maybe a good choice for directing people through a route

      and creating the buzz. 

• If you design an experience for engagement,

      a branded app, advergame, etc. maybe a good choice for brand awareness... 

ToDo

As you have noticed these are huge topics for a blog entry. So today, it’s important for us to plan “the should have ones” before creating a digital experience to be called digital CRM.

I suggest you to remember one more complementary entry;

what’s the state of your web presence?.

I’ll be happy, if you share things in mind to improve this important topic.

Post: Mar 30, 2010

Tags: web analytics