contentious.com

(NOTE: On May 19 I published a followup article containing a detailed response to this article by Cliff Allen, president of Coravue.)

For a while now, customer relationship management (CRM) technology has been all the rage in all sorts of organizations. The general idea is to efficiently and effectively manage what you know about your customers in order to communicate with them better and thus strengthen their connection to your company. Ideally, this leads to increased sales and lower cost of service.

The problem is, most CRM systems are implemented abysmally. They often end up harming customer relationships en masse, rather than helping them individually – mostly due to hamhanded automated communication goofs.

Consequently, I’m often skeptical about claims of great new CRM tools. However, today I heard about one approach that I think holds considerable potential, as long as it’s implemented thoughtfully: using CRM technology to generate personalized webfeeds for individual customers. (What’s a webfeed?)

More on this…

Check out this announcement, released today by CRM maker Coravue: “Coravue Adds Personalized RSS to Online CRM System: Trackable RSS delivers tailored marketing messages to the desktop.”

Now, to be clear, I am NOT endorsing Coravue here. I really know nothing about their system or track record, and I have not seen this feature demonstrated. However, I think this is a very smart direction for CRM. I don’t know for a fact whether Coravue is the first CRM company to offer this kind of feature – but if so, I hope other CRM vendors hear this call soon.

Here’s how Coravue describes this feature: “A personalized RSS feed works especially well for companies selling a wide range of products and companies selling into a wide range of market segments. Examples of the content that can be delivered via a personalized RSS feed include:

• Events near the subscriber
• Updates for products important to the customer
• News releases from key departments”

That indeed sounds very cool, from a content perspective. Especially if the customer (or prospective customer) can easily modify the type, content, and duration of the feed.

For instance, several of my friends here in Colorado are into xeriscaping (low-water-use landscaping) with native plants. Wouldn’t it be great if some of the major garden suppliers allowed them to subscribe to a special webfeed announcing new products or special offers in that narrow customer niche, including announcements of relevant local events (such as workshops)?

Now THAT would be cool. I would value that sort of customer communication far more than any e-mail newsletter or mass postal mailing that I’ve ever received!

“TRACKABLE?” WELL…

…On the downside, I’m not impressed by Coravue’s claims for tracking webfeed usage.

Coravue explains that their method of tracking webfeed usage involves merely counting clicks on links embedded in feed item headlines. Heck, anyone who publishes a webfeed can collect similar usage stats right now with any basic reporting package, such as Urchin.

I’d be careful with this particular bit of hype if I were you, Coravue. Webfeed usage tracking is a major hot-button issue for many current and would-be webfeed publishers. So far, there hasn’t been a good, easy solution. People who are intrigued by your trackability claim will probably be disappointed. That’s probably not the kind of promotion you want, in my humble opinion.