Some aspects of customer service are never going to change – anyone asking for assistance expects to be helped by someone who is knowledgeable, pleasant, presents the answer from the caller’s perspective, and is professional. There are other characteristics that callers prefer in their service provider, but they are not a core requirement. Most of us want to be helped by someone who seems interested and cares, as well as someone who “really gets it.” It’s not easy to do a good job of delivering customer service, and it’s only going to become more challenging as customer expectations become more demanding.

There are some interesting attitudes among callers today, including the fact that many would prefer not to have to call and speak to a customer service person. Calling and asking for help is the last resort for a surprising number of millennials. For many, “talking” means SMS or texting, and it’s taken as a personal affront if data is not available in their preferred channel.

In this environment, mobile applications (apps) are emerging at a rapid clip. Consumers cannot get enough of them, even if all they do is acquire them (mostly for free), use them once or twice, and move on to the next potentially more exciting application. While it may seem frivolous to purchase an app to point out the exact location of different stars in the night sky (actually, I think it’s rather cool), it’s not inane to want an app for banking, insurance, shopping, traffic, travel reservations, or to make medical appointments.

A new report from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by marketing automation provider Silverpop, offers little in the way of groundbreaking insights, but does provide plenty of data confirming what most already know: that many companies are failing to realize the true potential from their investments in marketing automation.

In the report, “Automation: Redefining Marketing’s Game Plan,” Forrester details the results of their surveying 155 US-based senior marketing professionals on their use of, results from, and attitudes towards marketing automation. To those of us who work in and around marketing automation every day, none of the results are startling. However, in sum, they do reinforce some key facts, namely:

• Most companies who employ marketing automation are realizing only a fraction of its potential because they tend to focus the technology on improving efficiency and addressing tactical needs

A couple of weeks back I wrote about using CRM technology to support major account planning, and that while it wasn’t perhaps the most glamorous use of CRM technology, it was a very cost-effective means to increase revenues. Another one of these ‘dull but effective’ uses of CRM is in the area of margin protection. As background a lot of organisations experience two issues:

Firstly, the company has limited visibility of future sales opportunities. Quotes and proposals may be stuck on individual hard drives, or lost in an array of folders on a shared drive somewhere. There may be some visibility in a pipeline/forecast report in Excel or a CRM system, but often there’s relatively little detail as to exactly what is being sold and at what price. For many organisations the first real visibility is when the order is processed.

Secondly, and I know I’m heading into dangerous stereotype territory, salespeople tend to be driven by getting the deal done rather protecting revenue or maximising the value of the deal.

The combination of these two factors means that many companies unnecessarily surrender margin, which in turn can have a profound impact on the bottom line.

There are a huge number of tools available to help sales professionals be more effective and efficient.  Properly used and implemented they can have a profound impact in improving sales performance.  At the same time, used improperly, the provide the potential of causing great problems or creating crap at the speed of light.  Every tool has the opportunity, properly used to have great impact or improperly used to have great negative impact.

Too often, however, it seems the implementation of the tool in itself, is the end rather than just a means.  People implement CRM thinking “because we have CRM, we have much greater insight into our customers, pipelines, opportunities, and so forth.”  Or implementing powerful research tools to provide great sales intelligence–without providing a foundation the sales people can intelligently use these tools.  Or providing great content and email marketing tools that are used to blindly inflict content on people who have no interest or desire to get that content.

 We too often forget about the fundamentals–the basic blocking and tackling, the foundations of sales effectiveness.  None of these tools replace the need for this, but the amplify the impact of the sales person using it.  A high performing sales person, executing a well defined sales process will get phenomenal benefit and create much more value using these tools.  They will be able to leverage their time and presence in ways they couldn’t without the tools.