Capital One is a favorite of CRM industry talkers as a shining example of a rousing success--I'm told it's because they have an impressive array of precisely targeted credit cards and potential cardholder offers, and that they make money hand over fist in a very competitive market. The latter, I can understand, but the former? I've thrown away dozens of Capital One offers without a second glance. Then, once I started wondering if there was something wrong with me because I didn't appreciate the precise targeting of my potential offer, I started looking more closely--and still came away unmoved.

So what do I like about the credit cards I do carry? I find their offers more appealing. True, I'm one of those insidious customers who looks for a good deal, and have seen three different "rewards" cards shut down because they couldn't extract enough value from me and the rest of the eager customers. But that's one of the ways I enjoy being related to--I enjoy being presented with a superlative offer, and I enjoy taking it. This pleases me more than knowing Capital One feels I meet their exacting profitability criteria. Of course, these companies have made no real effort to understand me as a customer—if they did, they would stop pulping tree after tree to send me convenience checks that I have never in my life used. But since the cost of asking is comparatively tiny compared to the potential reward, and the card issuers don't particularly care that I think their stubborn insistence makes them look dumb, they persist, hoping that one day an elephant will fall through my roof and, in a panic, I will reach for the nearest piece of scrip to pay for the damages and come up with a 30% interest convenience check.

Lands' End is another great universally lauded CRM company, usually for the "fitting" models on the website and for great catalog service. Not being possessed of hips or a bustline, I have to abstain here, and I certainly can't say that any of my clothing providers of choice have floored me.

How about automobiles? I admit, I was very drawn to Saturn's "different" campaigns of the early to mid 1990s, enough to consider them quite seriously. But the fact of the matter is that Saturn dealerships, for all their scrubbed low-pressure beauty, were selling small cars for a lot of money, and had a very strange answer when you would ask them about pricing. Two different dealers said "Well, I can show you the price list from another Saturn dealer, and ours are the same." It made me feel like a strange shell game was being played. Why didn't they simply show me their price list?

Nissan has been hailed a few times as a CRM exemplar. But it hasn't played out in my relationship with them. I drive a Nissan and I would consider the buying and owning experience a good one. But the dealer we worked with was gone by time we were in the market for another, nobody seemed especially interested in picking up the slack, and a lukewarm experience while shopping for another Nissan a couple of years back meant no new dollars to Nissan from my house.

I almost feel bad criticizing the automakers, as the franchise system as well as the production structure keeps automakers artificially distant from their customers. But it's the system they built and the one they're going to live or just struggle by on. (Speaking of cars, in an upcoming article, I'll have to relate the story of being thrown off the used car lot--easily in the top 5 strangest experiences I've ever had.)

Airlines? I've lived in the Midwest all my life, and current CRM darling JetBlue has this really conspicuous gap covering most of the country. I suppose I could fly out to Boston on another airline just to enjoy the JetBlue experience to take me somewhere else, but I think I'll pass. So I'm not important enough for JetBlue, and that's a failing grade. Previous CRM champ Southwest is a little more accessible, but I have not had occasion to use them in the past few years, so it's unclear if their perky simplicity can cut through the veil of fear and loathing the TSA and its 80 miles of tensile rope always manage to bestow upon me. In fact, I can only think of two truly exceptional airline experiences--one with the long-dead Kiwi Airlines, who provided me with a couple of really great trips between Chicago and Atlanta before they got cheap and cranky and annoyed me on the way to Orlando, and another with United Express after a major storm in Chicago, whose gate agents once let me pull off a major coup saving two hours of waiting in line and many more of waiting in airports, but would probably be impossible to repeat in this tensile-rope era.

Banks? Well, I enjoyed a pretty good relationship with a small suburban Chicago bank with patient, helpful service and flexible policies for a time before moving made it impractical to maintain. In my new hometown, I found a cadre of banks who all wanted to charge me annual service fees for the privilege of carrying an ATM card--the ultimate symbol of self-service and institutional cost reduction. In other words, I had to pay to save them money (or, in the case of the credit unions, I could take out 3 mortgages and 4 car loans and then they would consider letting me have the ATM card for "free.") I refused to play this game. The best I could do was to locate an institution that would charge me just once to take possession of a card. I acquiesced, but not before letting them hear about it. Their response was to impose fees on incoming foreign currency transfers, making it less lucrative for me to do business with overseas publishers.

This could go on for a while, but you get the point. I have examined the companies and I have examined myself and I am coming up with no easy answers. Have I simply become too jaded to accept the accomplishments of the lauded CRM giants and move on? Must I always be looking for what might be in it for me? As a matter of fact--yes, I do, because I am the customer. And I know that CRM isn't easy. But if you can't impress an educated customer enough to make him want to do business with you, are you really a CRM success?

None of the companies mentioned in this article have been clients of CRMuse LLC or Jason Compton for at least the past six months.