Actually the Romans come out rather well when Reg asks the questions of a bunch of masked activists in Matthias’s house in ‘The Life of Brian’. The aqueduct was just the beginning. Would CRM fare so well in a contemporary and probably unfunny update of the classic scene?

What has it done for us? Don’t misunderstand me. I use salesforce, my chosen flavour of CRM, every day. I wouldn’t be without it. Everything I do is captured in those seemingly simple customer, contact and opportunity tabs. However, what has it ever done for me … as a customer?

I have just finished Doc Searl’s latest book, the Intention Economy. It is a jarring book which turns CRM on it’s head, instead describing a world where software helps customers manage their suppliers rather than the other way round. It manages to be visionary by illustrating with situations which are utterly everyday. As customers, like frogs on slow-boil, we have come to accept the unacceptable. We tolerate what should be intolerable.

For example, Doc makes the point that when he travels by air (not unlike me) he has no special dietary requirements, places few demands on cabin crew, is likely to offer up his seat to accommodate a family or couple travelling together and is willing to pay (a little rather than take out a mortgage) extra to reduce the stress of travelling because the novelty has long since worn off. What his frequent flyer programme knows about him (and mine about me) is the total miles we have travelled and our address. Hmmm.

Yesterday,  I received a ‘personal’ note from a high street chain that I used to visit often but haven’t been able to recently.  Let’s say it’s a shop for the body. I shop here because I admired their deeply principled founder and her stand on ethical, environmental and social issues. I also like smelling like a satsuma. Mostly though, I shop there because there is convenient outlet on Waterloo concourse my gateway into and out of London. Rather, there was an outlet. It closed down during the station refurbishments and has yet to reappear. The CRM system that delivered the ‘personal’ note to me notes that they hadn’t seen me in a long time and offered me a generous discount to return. So far, so good. However, the featured products were wild rose hand cream, lip butter and a free makeover. I am a modern man and I freely admit that I prefer the smell of citrus fruit to masculine musk but it didn’t seem like a particularly compelling selection even for me.

And, this is a business I respect. At least their CRM had  spotted that it had been an unusually long time between the last transaction.

Another on-line retailer that I have been ‘loyal’ to for years has been through a recent CRM upgrade. I now only receive the section of their clothing catalogue for men. They finally understand my gender and no longer assume that my wife and I automatically like the same brand because we pick out curtains together. They worked out that I am a male and that I have different shopping habits to my wife. Big whoop.

This is the reality of CRM and Big Data today. Companies at the top of their game, with the most sophisticated CRM have worked out households, genders and not much more. And B2B is generally not even close. Many direct mail (interruptions) that I receive in my office inbox don’t even get my name correct and few, if any, are relevant to my job title or role.

It is true that sophisticated relevance marketing exists. These are the types of systems that can tell when you have started and finished the Atkins diet but they require a level of exclusivity associated with a church service and a gold band rather than the somewhat lighter associations most of us have with our grocers, coffee shops or satsuma scented shower gel supplier.

The Romans did actually give us irrigation, underfloor heating and straight roads but what has CRM ever done for us? We need more than a wallet full of loyalty cards, an iphone full of apps, licensing terms that we accept without reading and  discount vouchers with a redemption date just expired at the time we want to use them. It has a long way to go before it makes good use of all of that data, all those cookies and screens of social analytics. Mostly CRM needs to respect that unless it is going to make good and positive use of all of that data, that customers might tire of waiting, take it all back and start building VRM. The clock is ticking.