It’s the early days of Customer Relationship Management, and not everyone on the sales staff of this relational database vendor has gotten the hang of the new CRM system they use, according to a pilot fish on the customer side.

“Our salescritter didn’t quite understand the concept,” says fish. “His customer contact was Mike, so in the title field for Mike’s boss’s address, he literally put in ‘Mike’s Boss.’

“When Mike’s boss started getting mail addressed that way — and everything from sales brochures to the vendor’s magazine to bills began to come addressed that way — he came down hard on Mike.

“It took several months and repeated calls from Mike to the salescritter before the ‘Mike’s Boss’ mail stopped coming. I could see Mike cringe every time his boss came over with a new piece of mail to remind Mike that he had been instructed repeatedly to get this fixed.”

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