CRM - the real mirror of brands

?For a company - aftersales and CRM is clearly as important as sales, while on a customers’ prospective CRM prevails over the quality of the product or service offered. A global telenovela script has since a decade put between the clients and most of the large companies a phantomic team of phone responders, an army of bad English speakers and non-native employees, a so-called CRM gang whose answers are recorded at no point. These boys and girls are not there to solve any problem; this hired fishy structure of “I shall ask” people (in the best scenario) is a foreign partner who’s there to take the blame and to provide an ethical alibi to would-be reputable companies. The rest is poor math!

?Almost every important company selling online now hires CRM and telemarketing partners from cheap labor markets; their investors approve this with the goal to reduce costs and maintain a competitive advantage.

The management is happy to save on costs while taking a moderate risk to losing on brand reputation: even the fishermen know that their nets will be damaged while fishing. But they can be repaired, isn’t it?!

It’s a marketing job to enhance sales while fostering brand values. In all the cases the marketing dept. shall however swallow its dedicated funds. While lower costs affect a higher ROI – and this is a golden reward primarily to managers.

Also the CRM remote partners do know that the reputable companies hiring them are not worried about their end clients: all they need is a pertinent no-go for unsatisfied single online buyers, requesting afterwards common-sense changes and improvements that translate into costs. Therefore, the telemarketing and CRM companies do never agree to take responsibility and be accountable for the satisfaction of the call-in clients. Mainly such companies are based in South-eastern Europe (Albania, Romania, Serbia), in India, Philippines, etc.

Let’s make an example: you buy a flying ticket from a reputable airliner through a discounted option offered by a not-so-reputable reseller; till the moment you pay, all goes great. If you want to make a change into that ticket – five minutes after you acquired it – you are this ping pong ball that the two companies are playing with.

None of them is willing, nor in charge to apply any change, unless you go online and buy a new ticket.

Joke number one: you are not talking to the company whose ticket you have acquired. Joke number two: you are not talking neither to the reseller company, where you acquired the ticket.

You are talking to company number three – which pays CRM services to the company number two which sold you the ticket or to the company number four which is paying CRM services to company number one – where this flying ticket generates from.

However, it is sure that these two CRM operators will help you understand profoundly how vulnerable and unprotected you are (as a client): they do so by adding pain and costs (sometimes not only moral ones) to you!

This discussion can easily fall into an ideological abyss – with futile questions like:

“what part of the profit do major companies and their investors make from their foreign partners in poorly paid markets?”; or “is this part of the profit ever disclosed to the public?” etc.

Since late ‘80s, CRM made its way to market as it bolstered the brand awareness while driving demand and generating sales, in compliance with client satisfaction.

Tomorrow AI and robots shall perform better than the over-seas service providers and the future may be brilliant for those brands that will?survive.

Till that day companies better tailor their CRM according to their competitive advantage’ basket of values.

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