Customer Relationship Management

Now We concentrate on Customer Relationship Management One's of the substitute Of ERP.

CRM

• CRM “is a business strategy that aims to understand, anticipate and manage the needs of an organisation’s current and potential customers”

• It is a “comprehensive approach which provides seamless integration of every area of business that touches the customer- namely marketing, sales, customer services and field support through the integration of people, process and technology”

• CRM is a shift from traditional marketing as it focuses on the retention of customers in addition to the acquisition of new customers

• “The expression Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is becoming standard terminology, replacing what is widely perceived to be a misleadingly narrow term, relationship marketing (RM)”

• Customer relationship management is one of the best ways to improve your company’s performance over time. With focused, carefully designed CRM efforts, you can take your relationship with your clients and customers to a new level. 

 CRM involves the following :

• Organisations must become customer focused

• Organisations must be prepared to adapt so that it take customer needs into account and delivers them

• Market research must be undertaken to assess customer needs and satisfaction

Benefits of CRM :-

 Increased Revenue

• Improve Customer Retention.
• Attract New Customers.
• Up Sell-Cross Sell   

 Decreased Costs

• Automate Tasks.
• Improve Campaign Efficiency
• Improve Forecast Accuracy and Timeless.

 Intangibles

• Increase Customer Satisfaction.
• Improve Products and Pricing Models.
• Increase Knowledge Retention and Implementation.
• Differentiate Yourself In Marketplace.
• Increase your Understanding Of Your Customers.

Strategy :-

For larger-scale enterprises, a complete and detailed plan is required to obtain the funding, resources, and company-wide support that can make the initiative of choosing and implementing a system successfully. Benefits must be defined, risks assessed, and cost quantified in three general areas:

• Processes: It can be seen as a more client-centric way of doing business, enabled by technology that consolidates and intelligently distributes pertinent information about clients, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness, and market trends. Therefore, a company must analyze its business workflows and processes before choosing a technology platform; some will likely need re-engineering to better serve the overall goal of winning and satisfying clients. Moreover, planners need to determine the types of client information that are most relevant, and how best to employ them.

• People: For an initiative to be effective, an organization must convince its staff that the new technology and workflows will benefit employees as well as clients. Senior executives need to be strong and visible advocates who can clearly state and support the case for change. Collaboration, teamwork, and two-way communication should be encouraged across hierarchical boundaries, especially with respect to process improvement.

• Technology: In evaluating technology, key factors include alignment with the company’s business process strategy and goals, including the ability to deliver the right data to the right employees and sufficient ease of adoption and use. Platform selection is best undertaken by a carefully chosen group of executives who understand the business processes to be automated as well as the software issues. Depending upon the size of the company and the breadth of data, choosing an application can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more.

Common field support challenges :-

• Organizations are looking at field support personnel to evolve their Customer Relationship Management practices to better understand how the customer is using the product, identify cross-sell/up-sell opportunities and strengthen loyalty. However, the ground problems in field support result in lower customer satisfaction, higher churn rates and lost opportunities.

• Field support organizations face inefficient dispatch, low first call fix rates and inadequate call reporting.

• How many times does your field support have to make yet another trip to close the case because they did not have the right parts and tools? How about lost revenue because of inadequate call reporting?

Information Technology  And CRM :-
   

• Technology plays a pivotal role in CRM

• Technological approaches involving the use of databases, data mining and one-to-one marketing can assist organisations to increase customer value and their own profitability

• This type of technology can be used to keep a record of customers names and contact details in addition to their history of buying products or using services

• This information can be used to target customers in a personalised way and offer them services to meet their specific needs 

• This personalised communication provides value for the customer and increases customers loyalty to the provider

 Examples

  Here are examples of how technology can be used to create personalised services to increase loyalty in customers:

  1. Phone calls, emails, mobile phone text messages, or WAP services :-

• Having access to customers contact details and their service or purchase preferences through databases etc can enable organisations to alert customers to new, similar or alternative services or products    

• Illustration: When tickets are purchased online via Lastminute.com, the website retains the customers details and their purchase history. The website regularly send emails to previous customers to inform them of similar upcoming events or special discounts. This helps to ensure that customers will continue to purchase tickets from Lastminute.com in the future.

   2. Cookies :-

•  “A “cookie” is a parcel of text sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. HTTP cookies are used for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences and the contents of their electronic shopping carts” .

• Illustration: The online store, Amazon, uses “cookies” to provide a personalised service for its customers. Amazon requires customers to register with the service when they purchase items. When registered customers log in to Amazon at a later time, they are ‘greeted’ with a welcome message which uses their name (for e.g. “Hello John”). In addition, their previous purchases are highlighted and a list of similar items that the customer may wish to purchase are also highlighted.

   3. Loyalty cards :-

   

•  “The primary role of a retailer loyalty card is to gather data about customers. This in turn leads to customer comprehension and cost insights (e.g. customer retention rates at different spending levels, response rates to offers, new customer conversion rates, and where money is being wasted on circulars), followed by appropriate marketing action and follow-up analysis”.

• Illustration: The supermarket chain, Tescos, offers loyalty cards to its customers. When customers use the loyalty cards during pay transactions for goods, details of the purchases are stored in a database which enables Tescos to keep track of all the purchases that their customers make. At regular intervals, Tescos sends its customers money saving coupons by post for the products that the customers have bought in the past. The aim of this is to encourage customers to continually return to Tescos to do their shopping.

 
   4. CRM software- “Front office” solutions :-   

• “Many call centres use CRM software to store all of their customer's details. When a customer calls, the system can be used to retrieve and store information relevant to the customer. By serving the customer quickly and efficiently, and also keeping all information on a customer in one place, a company aims to make cost savings, and also encourage new customers". 

>>> Face-to-face CRM :- 

• CRM can also be carried out in face-to-face interactions without the use of technology

• Staff members often remember the names and favourite services/products of regular customers and use this information to create a personalised service for them.

• For example, in a hospital library you will know the name of nurses that come in often and probably remember the area that they work in.

• However, face-to-face CRM could prove less useful when organisations have a large number of customers as it would be more difficult to remember details about each of them.
  

>>> Big Businesses’ Biggest Secret :-

• What makes big companies so successful?  Is it product quality, customer service, cost?  These three things and many more definitely play a large role, but one thing you will find in common with all large companies is that they have their business processes down to a science.

• Large companies have realized that they can be the most efficient by automating processes, saving themselves time and money, ultimately benefiting their bottom line.  Take a look at McDonald’s for example.  They have fine-tuned the art of running a fast food restaurant.  From cooking the burgers to measuring condiments, every single detail is measured and automated so the company is as cost-effective and time-efficient as it can possibly be.

• Now, a small business owner might thing to himself, “I just don’t have the time or resources to automate processes like the big guys do.”  But that’s where he’s wrong!  A good CRM system can help small businesses automate and fine tune processes for relatively low to no cost, depending on the program they choose.  A CRM solution is vital for any business to grow because it helps automate many processes such as sending email responses, scheduling follow-ups, rescheduling calls and meetings, and measuring results.     

>>> Having trouble organizing your day? It’s CRM to the rescue !

• We all struggle juggling with our priorities and complain there’s not enough hours in the day to finish everything on our task lists.  Between work and family life, keeping up with the day’s activities can be a real pain.  And although the technology age promised more manageable days and streamlined tasks, many of us find technology has just encouraged an increase in our workload.

• So how can we prioritize our workload and streamline our work processes to be more efficient?  Just the task of going through daily emails, understanding the context, and answering them in order of priority is a task that slows many people down throughout the day, reducing their productivity.

But how do we stay afloat in the never ending cycle of increasing
technology = increased workloads?  Savvy workers use a CRM  system to stay organized and to prioritize their tasks throughout the day.

• Here are a few great ways to leverage the awesome power of an effective CRM solution to keep you organized and productive:

• Integrate your email accounts into your CRM. Integrating email into your CRM has huge advantages, such as ensuring your emails, contacts, and tasks are all in one easily accessible place.

• Use follow-up reminders.  A CRM can schedule various reminders so you can easily keep track of who to follow up with and when.

• Attach notes and documents to contacts.  You can attach various notes and other documents such as quotes or purchase orders to a contact’s record so you can access it easily and retrieve it in an instant.

• Use auto-responders.   You can set up auto response emails to certain email requests that you get regularly so that you don’t have to retype the same information over and over for similar requests, and do it all without having to lift a finger!

>>> No CRM is an Island :-

• Most companies have many different departments working on many different things to accomplish one goal: producing a product or service to the satisfaction of their customers.  Unfortunately, even in this day and age of advanced technology, many times each department keeps to themselves with little interaction with other departments.  This can create a huge problem when things go awry.

• For example, if a customer calls the shipping department of an online shoe store and says they never received their shipment, the shipping manager might check the records, see that there was an error, and send the shoes out to the customer.  Problem solved, right?  Not necessarily.  Because what the shipping manager didn’t know was that after speaking with him, the customer called customer service to complain as well, and the customer service representative put in a request to shipping to send out the package.  Now the customer will end up with two pairs of the same shoes, making the company look unprofessional and also losing profit at the same time.

• With an effective CRM solution, no man or department is an island.  Everyone uses the same system, and is able to access the entire history of interactions with a specific customer from start to finish.  That means that in the earlier scenario, the customer service representative would have immediately seen that the shipping manager already corrected the error and would not have sent out another pair of shoes to the customer.

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