Customer Relationship Management in Plain English

Most managers of small to medium-sized organizations have probably heard about the millions of dollars larger companies have spent on systems for customer relationship management. Many have no doubt asked, ‘What’s the point?’, or even, ‘what is it?’.For consumers, there is so often little evidence that the expenditure has achieved anything.

In fact, the aim of CRM is a seamless organization. It is designed so that no matter how a prospect or customer contacts you, the information coming out of the contact will be coordinated internally to give the business a complete picture of the individual.

A customer can enter a competition on your website, pay a bill through the post, phone for information about a new product and send in a newspaper coupon, and the perfect CRM system will track all such contacts and provide a single client view. That’s the theory.

With such information, the marketer should then be able to make relevant offers and up-sell to customers in a manner and at a time that suits them and meets their needs.

Well, we all know that in many places and in many cases, CRM has failed to deliver. However, that is not to say there is no value in it at all. Essentially it is all about dealing with customers and that’s at the core of all business.

As the name, ‘customer relationship management’ implies, this new buzzword refers to looking after your customers.

If CRM can help us deliver friendlier and more efficient personal service, we are all for it. After all, a business only remains in business if the frontline team members (be they owners, managers or juniors) can relate with customers – preferably in a manner that suits the customers.

CRM systems are tools for integrating data and activities relating to customers, so that everyone in the business can keep track of what customers are up to.

Recognizing that not all customers are equal, a practical CRM system is able to identify segments and aid in the delivery of suitably weighted marketing to each segment.

Obviously, effective segmentation demands that a customer who has regularly provided profitable referrals should be placed in a separate segment and treated quite differently from an unknown prospect, who has made only an initial enquiry.

Such thoughtful marketing and segmentation is a worthwhile aim for any business, but for small operators looking to go down that path, it is important to remember that maybe 80 percent of all CRM relates to the quality of your people.

If your receptionist receives a call from an unhappy customer and the relevant account manager is out of reach, then a user-friendly CRM system should enable the receptionist to pull up the client’s data to begin the recovery process.

However, the best system in the world is of little use if the receptionist is not adequately trained nor sufficiently proactive to get into the system and start asking the right questions.

Before spending a bucket full of money on a new CRM system, managers should know that there are certain critical factors that have a big bearing on determining results. These include:

• Setting measurable goals with team members input and communicating these goals to everyone,
• Obtaining support from all team members at all levels and ensuring that everyone sees how any new system will benefit customers and the business,
• Selecting technology functions only where they are in line with business goals,
• Cutting set-up costs by limiting the amount of customization to what is essential,
• Using only team members who are trained properly for customer contact roles,
• Rolling out any new system only gradually so that bugs or defects can be managed early before spreading negative impacts to the whole customer base, and
• Measuring, monitoring and tracking at every point along the way in order to check the results being achieved.

Copyright 2002, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com