"I was present at the birth of CRM": Part one

MyCustomer.com is ten years old! Richard Forsyth established the community under its original guise - CRM Forum - in 1997. And to celebrate, Richard revisits the customer management landscape of a decade ago...

By Richard Forsyth

One of my ‘claims to fame’ within the CRM sector is establishing the CRM Forum – MyCustomer.com’s original incarnation. But I also claim to have been present at the birth (or at least christening) of customer relationship management itself.

I remember the christening party - an internal McKinsey practice development meeting. I, however, was an external party, advising McKinsey on strategy.

We’d been discussing customer databases, how one could use them to improve customer service, and even sell things to people, when someone decided we needed a TLA (three letter acronym). After some discussion, we agreed on “CRM”. We didn’t agree on what CRM stood for (“continuous relationship management”; “customer relationship marketing”; “customer relationship management”) but we knew what the acronym was. Get the brand right and the product will follow!!!

Of course, CRM didn’t leap fully-formed into the world around 1995. It was out of database marketing by sales lead management (as they say at the gee-gees). At least that’s my view of the parents, but it may be a bit of a bastard.

And what was CRM? Well, a bit like the elephant defined by blind men - it all depends which bit of it you touched. So let me tell you a bit about some of the bits I touched on in projects.

Prior to working as a consultant and advising McKinsey and IBM, I’d been working on marketing databases, and I guess some of the projects we did in the early 90s would count as CRM projects even if we didn’t call them that back then.

We ran a fairly large project for Bank of Scotland around 1990 to take its account-based systems and create a customer view, using de-duplication software. The bank believed in the quality of their data, so it incentivised the branch staff to go through each resulting customer record and correct the mis-matches and data errors.

In no other project I’ve been involved in, has so much effort gone into the accuracy of the data. But of course, even the most sophisticated system using rubbish data produces rubbish. Garbage in – garbage out. I’d be surprised if many of you aren’t still living with the consequences of poor data (not to say lost data, Gordon).

For part two of Richard Forsyth's look at the face of CRM ten years ago, click here.