C R M as a strategic marketing tool

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the marketing management practice of identifying, attracting and retaining the most valuable customers to sustain profitable growth

Customer Relationship Management is also the process of making and keeping customers and maximizing their profitability, behaviors and satisfaction.

Today Customer demand open equal access, real time specialized information, convenient access, information portability, process & logistics transparency, pricing transparency, global pricing, ability to set prices, choice of distribution channels and control over their information

Maintaining relationship is the key to success of your business. By doing that, your first-time customer can become a repeat customer, thereafter a client, then an advocate and finally your partner in progress.

However the worst point is that at any point in the above process, he could disconnect from you and therefore, it is all the more important to reiterate the relationship with him.

From your loyal customers, in addition to getting the base profit, you can also earn from reduced operating cost, increased purchases and getting plenty of referrals.

We also understand from the realistic observation on customers that it costs ten times more to sell to a new customer than to sell to an existing one. When the odds of selling to a new customer are 15 percent, the odds of selling to an existing customer are 50 percent. And a typical dissatisfied customer will tell 8 to 10 people about his or her bad experience. It is also true that eighty percent of complaining customers will do business with the company again if it quickly takes care of the problem. 45% of customers switching suppliers cite customer service issues as the reason for the switch.

The 80-20 principle is valid in sales & marketing too. 20% of the customers deliver 80% of revenues and many times, more than 100% of profits. Existing customers deliver most of the revenues. However more attention – and money– is often spent on non-customers. It is therefore important to identify the most valuable customers (MVCs) for the success of the business.

A small net upwards migration of customers can deliver a dramatic improvement in business performance. 5-10% of the small customers can move immediately to the top. But an upward migration only happens when customers are very satisfied. But even reasonably satisfied customers defect.

Marketing and sales are charged with influencing customer behaviour but other departments involved with customer processes also influence on customers – for better or worse.

What we need to accept is that Customer success equals business Success

Identify the Most valuable Customers (MVCs)

To identify our customers, we need to ask plenty of questions: Here are some of them:

· Do you know who your most valuable customers are?
· Who owns him and his data? The product group? The sales team? Or the IT department of your company?
· What if the customer has many product relationships in your company?
· Can you identify the customer if he calls you? Or when he e-mails you?
· Do you know how much money does he make for you?
· Which products of yours does this customer have?
· What is the total value of this customer relationship?
· If he calls up at the call center, would your agent know the entire relationship?
· Can he talk about all your different products in the same call?
· Can you gather intelligence from each one of his transactions?
· Does the 80:20 rule apply to your customer?
· Is there any customer you would rather you not have?
· Can you anticipate what the needs of the customer are?
· Can you atomically take action on your mediocre customer to make them profitable?
· Can you do this with another 100,000 customers?

Why CRM practice is required in your organization?

• Leads generated from your expensive campaigns may be lost because they were not tracked properly.


• New customers may be lost because, having acquired, you have not kept in touch with them (Hole in the Bucket Syndrome)


• Business from your existing clients may not happen because you really don’t know who they are, what they are buying and what they will need.


• Credibility with the customers may be lost because your sales and support force is not fully informed about them and haven’t done their homework well enough.

CRM practices create Customer equity which is the combination of brand Equity and relationship Equity.

To create customer equity, you need to provide him the best experience. Customer experience is defined as a consistent representation and flawless execution, across distribution channels and his interaction touch points, of the emotional connection and relationship you want your customers to have with your company and your brand.

Now it is clearly understood that CRM as a strategic management practice helps companies acquire, grow and retain customers. In this heavily automated technological word, is there a possibility to automate these practices, thereby increasing productivity and the chances of increasing the success ratio?

From Management, let us move into technology.

With the advent of intuitive programming technologies, today there exist many software application programs developed by reputed companies for managing the relationship with its customers. Siebel, Microsoft CRM, MYSAP, Salesforce.com etc are highly flexible, integrated applications that help customers achieve this objective. The following explains how it can be achieved.

Ways to win the customer

• By tracking and managing your leads to a closure.


• By documenting all sales cycles & account info and creating a knowledge base


• By breaking functional silos and tightly integrating all customer-facing processes.


• y keeping continuous track of your customers’ preferences / propensities and getting intimate; and


• Getting a 360 degree view of the customer and becoming accountable as an organization

How does it help sales function?

• Supports key functions such as contact management, opportunity management


• Forecasting a 360-degree view of all customer accounts and interactions


• Automate and organize sales force activities for focused selling and closing, synchronize the calendar, to-do items and contacts so you can access your key accounts

Helping marketing function

• Supports key functions such as campaign management and analysis, and customer demographic analysis.


• Create prospects lists using an advanced filtering capability.


• Easily import prospects lists from third-party sources


• Create email blasts through mail merge and telemarketing scripts for phone campaigns.


• Automatically pass leads to appropriate Sales Agents to ensure trace ability to originating campaigns.

Benefiting customer Service function

• Provides an efficient workflow and easy access to information while synchronizing customer data across all communication channels


• Provide self-service and assisted service to optimise resources


• Create configurable task lists for consistency in coaching Customer Service Reps


• Effectively schedule CSRs by analyzing when and how customers contact you.

Helping Partner Management

• Track and analyse sales made by partners, and track contracts associated with VARs, dealers, distributors and other channel partners.


• Configure partner access to restricted information.


• Auto-route opportunities and incidents to partner representative.

Workflow Automation

• Design and automate replies or confirmations for web forms and email queries


• Generate leads based on predefined campaigns and customer segmentation


• Route customer request based on employee skills or customer priority


• Set times or alarms to remind staff to take specific actions


• Define escalation processes and notification alerts


• Query or update customer and third-party database.


• Dynamically add new, or update, workflows without shutting the systems down.


• Define and integrate partner-specific workflow steps.


• Use predefined queries or create your own to define and test decision blocks within a workflow.

Business Analysis and Reporting

CRM allows users to quickly view pre-configured reports or create new ones and view real-time or historic data for any business function. Powerful business analysis tools such as Sales management reporting and analysis, Customer service reporting and analysis E Commerce reporting and analysis, Partner management, Marketing campaigns, Demographic Sampling and Data integration can be had from the application which shall help you arrive at informed decisions.

There are powerful web-based Customer Relationship Management applications that give small and mid-sized companies leading-edge capabilities and all the key functionality of a large CRM system, with unprecedented ease of use. Most of these applications seamlessly unify information from e-mail, web chat, web forms, PDAs, wireless devices, telephone and fax. And it provides complete integration of customers and partners and the front-office functions of sales, marketing, service, as well as accounting, distribution and other back- office activities to give you a complete view of your customers and employees.

Conclusion

The attempt here have been to describe the importance of following CRM practices for acquiring, retaining and growing customers for sustained success for companies and how it could be automated as an application practice with the help of organization’s IT infrastructure. The whole infrastructure combined with the knowledge that it brings forth, guide the destiny of companies in this extremely competitive world. CRM forms the biggest strategic asset that the companies can have for effectively implementing its marketing plans.