Why it’s hard to assess value of personal touch?   Is your company struggling to prove a return on investment (ROI) from its customer relationship management programme (CRM)? A new twist in this long-running saga comes from John McKean of the Centre for Information Based Competition in the US. 70% of buyer decision-making, it seems, is driven by what you might call ‘interaction value’, the emotions generated by how I am treated as a person rather than the actual content of the transaction. Do you acknowledge me? Do you show respect for my time, my privacy, and so on? Can I trust you? According to McKean, the most effective sales processes are not those that focus resolutely on the company’s selling objectives per se, but those that increase the buyer’s sense of convenience, control, and autonomy. Yet none of these buyer emotions register on the accountant’s financial control screen. But the same accounting systems register the benefits of added convenience, control and autonomy for companies because they translate directly into increased efficiency and lower costs. The result: in their quest for positive ROI, many companies implement technologies (including CRM programmes) that positively sap that crucial 70%.  And the knock-on benefits are only realised much later in repeat purchases and word-of-mouth recommendation, which are hard to capture in robust ROI calculations. If you ROI looks bad, maybe you are not doing the right things. Or maybe you are using the wrong measures. Or, and this frightening, both: the wrong things.

Alan Mitchell