Somewhere during the vendor selection process or implementation planning stage the company will discover how loaded a word loyalty is. For those companies who have gotten expensive IT investment right in the past, they will need to remain loyal to their decision and planning designs. For everyone else, clearly defining what loyalty means prevents a betrayal of business judgement, because disillusionment can quickly follow unrealistic expectations from this software. Expectations as high as they are for CRM are arguably unknown to any other class of enterprise application. Process improvement and efficiency is nice, but CRM is expected to deliver incremental revenue through loyal customers.
Loyalty really means many things.
Extending life time customer value is one. Any way you look at it, CRM is expected to engender loyalty so consumers buy more stuff from you and not the other guy. And it can't be better relationships with our customer. The value has to be tied to revenue, says Matt Duncan, vice president of Pivotal Corp., provider of XML-based demand chain networks. The idea Peppers and Rogers espouse is that the existence of interactive technologies allows customers to talk back to companies.