Blog: Jill Dyche

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Do MDM Vendors Eat Their Own Dog Food?

In which Jill wistfully remembers the good old days when you could "install" customer relationship management and be done with it--yeah, right--and wonders whether some MDM vendors are hoping for an encore.

Remember the heyday of CRM when stories of customer intimacy were as routine as junebugs in August? Companies across industries trumpeted their mastery at enhancing the customer experience. You probably read about the airline whose yield management analysis drove prioritized seat assignment for its high-profit flyers, or the regional bank that centered its outbound campaigns on a mix of behaviors and life stage. The articles heralded that these “best practice” companies had their customer management licked. And you’d say to yourself, Wait a minute. I’ve shopped there/flown them/hit their website and they mucked everything up! That company sucks!

It’s easy enough to hear a PR agency or marketing department describe how a company has excelled. As consultants, we routinely see operational mediocrity up close and personal, and it’s not pretty. In fact, it can be dismissive, orotund, cranky, and flagrantly unapologetic. Sometimes the operational mediocrity even taunts you, as if to say, “Hey, I’m making money, so I don’t care if I don’t know revenue by product or can’t cross-sell my policy holders or predict what my customers will buy. I’m mediocre, I’m change-averse, I have no metrics, technology is a cost burden, but that’s all okay because our stock price is up, up, up!”

The most recent example of this is jetBlue, the darling of an industry long commoditized. Bad weather and a few grounded airplanes can transform happy vacationers into a furious, stentorian mob. A furious, stentorian mob who talks to the media. And, as we learned from—or despite—our CRM projects, viral marketing can be a bitch.

My friend Kevin Davis is heading up a CDI vendor evaluation for a Big Company, and recently related the following story:

As you know we are looking at implementing a CDI solution, and as part of our research we attended the CDI summit back in the fall. We had dinner with a leading CDI vendor who was well-versed in identity management and party reconciliation. All went well and we felt we had learned a few things. Two weeks later, a package comes in the mail to me from the vendor. Once I opened it, I laughed out loud. It was a form letter (using my info given at their booth because it had my full name) informing me about them, signed by the host of the dinner! Are they using their own technology? And if so, what does that say?

Et tu, MDM? Say it ain’t so! Kevin’s story is evocative of so many vendors who proselytize but don’t practice. I hope that changes and they eat their own dog food. Or drink their own bath water, as the case may be.

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