What is CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) combines business strategy and technology to identify, acquire and retain profitable customer relationships. CRM creates a comprehensive picture of a customer across all channels by analyzing information collected during every transaction and interaction (such as purchases, support calls, returns, and other activities). This multidimensional analysis reveals a wealth of customer information. Some customers are more valuable than others, so organizations must maximize their marketing, product, and service investments based on a customer’s true value to the business. Better Management presents extensive resources on customer relationship management topics to help you develop strategies to optimize your customer relationships.
CRM goals
1) Increase customer revenue and cost effectiveness overtime.
2) Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by providing better customer service.
3) Optimize the management of customer life cycles.
4) Improve the efficiency of your technical and sales staff.
5) Allows easy access to customer service records, contact information, assigned assets, and sales development.
Customer relationship life cycle
There are three main areas that focus on customer satisfaction,
1) Dirty.
two) Marketing.
3) Service.
The professional sales force predicts and proposes the analysis of information in real time and distributes this information to the company and business partners Marketing focuses on personalizing customer preferences and offering them satisfactory experiences The service is associated with the call centers of companies and coordinates the interaction between the web, email and other means of communication.
Client management tools
1) Email, telephone and postal mail.
2) The Internet should be one of your main tools for sales research. News articles, financial statements, and the company’s website are often great indicators of what kind of business your client is actually doing.
3) Promotional materials like a mouse pad or t-shirt with your company name will serve as a subtle sign of your relationship.
How much does CRM cost?
A recent (2001) survey of more than 1,600 business and IT professionals, conducted by the Data Warehousing Institute, found that close to 50% had CRM project budgets of less than $500,000. That would seem to indicate that CRM doesn’t have to be a budget buster. However, the same survey showed a handful of respondents with CRM project budgets of more than $10 million. Licensing fees for a typical web-based CRM solution range from $60 to $80 per month per user. However, the main costs associated with CRM are not license fees, but rather the time an organization spends keeping the CRM system up to date. With many CRM solutions, the value of time spent keeping the system up to date is 10 times higher than the CRM license fees. Low user acceptance is often a challenge, as it is difficult to get teams to give up existing processes. This is particularly true when the alternative requires an additional 30-60 minutes of data entry each day.
What makes CRM projects fail?
The lack of communication between everyone in the customer relationship chain can generate an incomplete image of the customer. Poor communication can lead to technology being implemented without adequate support or acceptance by users. For example, if the sales force is not fully convinced of the benefits of the system, they may not enter the kind of demographic data that is essential to the success of the program. A Fortune 500 company is on its fourth CRM implementation attempt, largely because its sales force resisted all previous efforts to share customer data.
Current developments and CRM news
*quantum corporationa storage provider, announced that it received two distinguished awards for achieving excellence in all key aspects of the customer experience through its service and support programs.
*For the second year in a row, Quantum earned a NorthFace ScoreBoardSM award for exemplary customer service from Omega Management Group Corp..
*Quantum has also been honored as the recipient of a 2006 Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA) STAR Award for Best Practices.
*KITE The group selects Kaidara to improve customer service and support.
conclusion
Customer relationship management today it’s all about tracking and analyzing explicit information about current customers and sales prospects. CRM software must be implemented in a rigorous, disciplined, and coordinated manner to achieve any promised potential.
