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CRM - The Comeback King
Customer relationship management, or CRM was once
touted as the way of the future for all businesses. If the customer was
truly king, CRM would be the way we courted royalty and retained their
support. But when the anticipated gains didn’t materialize many business
analysts were willing to dismiss CRM as just another passing fad that
failed.
Early CRM implementations tried to cover too many aspects of too many
businesses. They were oversold and loaded with overpromises about what
functions they could handle and were found sorely wanting in the
performance area.
Most early CRM solutions were primarily sales force automation systems.
They had little connection to the company’s marketing requirements and
only scratched the surface of what CRM was supposed to do. The result
was a disappointing return on investment - a once-promising CRM project
that management and investors saw as an expensive failure.
However CRM never really went away. It’s such a good idea that its early
failures caused many people to suspect that maybe the fault lay in the
implementation rather than the concept, so they tried harder to make it
work and to a great degree have got it back on the road to success.
A CRM system can be a valuable and very powerful tool. It's often the
only practical way of handling a large customer base and being able to
give customers the service they want and that the business wants to give
them.
The majority of SMEs do not have a CRM solution. Because of this,
information is not shared; it stays locked up in various departments or
even on certain PCs around the office. How much better it would be if
their credit control, sales and marketing people and systems across the
organization could act together.
CRM is not really a single solution. It is a package of several
solutions that aren’t all needed by every enterprise. Particularly at
the SME end of the market it needs to be a robust form of managing
customer contact that interfaces smoothly with the people in the
business.
CRM can, if needed, also be applied to such functions as analysis of
marketing results, recording sales performance and calculating customer
value. It can be a source of customer information that is accessed and
used as needed by everybody in the firm. It’s all a matter of how the
installation is designed.
It begins with the organization deciding just what it is that CRM is
needed to do. The CRM system is then built around those needs. Trying to
fit a proprietary CRM system to an organization is the wrong way to go
about it, which is one reason for the long list of early failures. CRM
is a journey, not a destination.
When companies begin their CRM journey they want to gain customer
loyalty by enhancing their relationship with customers. The end goal is
to achieve longer lasting and better quality customer relationships that
deliver greater profitability.
This means that companies have to be sure they understand their
customers before designing their CRM systems. What measurements need to
be taken and tracked to determine what those customers want and how they
wish to be treated?
Another key aspect of CRM is that it is capable of personalizing each
customer’s experience with the company at every touchpoint. There’s no
value in having a customer treated differently by different departments.
There’s even less merit in having a system that lets the account
department recognize a repeat customer but leaves the sales team in the
dark. A customer’s perceptions of the business should be pleasantly
reinforced by each contact.
Here is a brief list of the steps to follow before commencing the design
and implementation of a CRM system:
1. Determine the quality of the existing customer data. Is it good
enough to use as the basis for personalizing the company’s contacts with
customers? It needs to be reliable and accessible so the system can work
with it.
2. Define the objectives of the CRM system. Precisely what is it to
achieve? What information will it obtain and deliver?
3. How will the offerings of the business relate to customer needs?
4. Where will the CRM system create personalized customer experiences
and how will it do this?
5. What are the CRM system’s metrics that can be monitored to determine
its rates of success?
Each of these steps identifies an area for research and evaluation. A
committee should be formed that represents every department of the
business to answer these questions in as much detail as possible. The
accounts department will have entirely different demands from sales, but
both sets of demands need to be met.
CRM aims to provide a single view of customers and prospective customers
across the organization. It also aims to give each customer and
prospective customer a favorable experience at every touchpoint,
including those where the business reaches out to contact customers.
It can only do this if the system is designed with an integration of
marketing, sales and customer service functions. The technology to do
this has existed for several years; the application of this technology
has in the past been overly focused on sales to the detriment of other
business areas. CRM never failed; it was just badly let down.
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