Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

What Types of Companies Can Use CRM Systems?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are designed to assist companies in improving their relationships with their clients. They help the business to identify, attract and retain customers. A good CRM system supports client loyalty, which increases word-of-mouth advertising and results in additional clients for the business. One niche of a good CRM system is that it has a strong social media component, assisting the business in utilizing social media systems to greatly improve client relations. Think that your business isn’t the type of business that could benefit from a social CRM system? Think again! Many different companies can improve their bottom line using CRM systems, companies including:

1. B2B companies. A business that sells goods to other businesses is usually selling a lot of item volume at one time. This means that the loss of a single customer can be a huge financial loss for the B2B company. That’s why it is so important to keep all customers happy. CRM systems keep information organized and encourage prompt responses to issues with clients. This effective means of retaining customers can make a huge difference in a large business where losing even one customer can significantly decrease profits.
2. B2C companies. Although business-to-consumer companies work in smaller volumes than B2B companies, it is still crucial for them to retain their customers. CRM systems, especially those with a social component, help to simplify this process through extended communication with the customer. Additionally, B2C customers need to regularly add new customers to their client list in order to grow and CRM systems are designed to aid in this with targeted marketing that will facilitate lead generation in an efficient fashion.
3. Online retailers. Online retailers are competing with other retailers in their industry across the entire globe (rather than just locally like a physical store would). As a result, they really need to step up their game in order to stand out amongst the competition. Proper use of social CRM facilitates this, assisting the online retailers in building a brand as well as a credible following through social media interaction. Of course, some online retailers also have an individual storefront even though they do a lot of their sales online. In this case, the CRM system can also help to integrate the online and offline store so that customers find the entire shopping experience more pleasant.
4. Other e-commerce businesses. Online retailers make up a large percentage of the business that is done online but there are other e-commerce stores online as well. For example, B2B commodities exchange and the sale of subscriptions to premium web content are e-commerce sites that aren’t online retailers. Nevertheless, these types of business do benefit from the use of CRM systems for the same basic reasons that other online retailers do.
5. Mom and Pop stores. Many small independent location-based stores don’t feel like it is necessary to invest in the tools that are used by larger businesses. However, CRM systems can be really great for these small businesses. Such businesses benefit immensely from having an active social media presence in their community and industry niche. CRM systems that involve social integration make this much simpler and much less time-consuming, which is very important when you’ve only got a couple of people doing all of the work. And don’t worry; most CRM systems are designed to be highly user-friendly so even the least tech-savvy of Mom and Pop stores can get the hang of them rather quickly.

TYPES OF CRM SYSTEMS STRATEGIC CRM

 

Strategic CRM – Mainitain Long Term Relationship with Customers

---

The aim of strategic CRM is to concentrate and enhance the knowledge about customers and use this knowledge to improve and customize the interactions with customers to maintain a long-term relationship with them. Determining and development of CRM strategies involves following steps: Amplify Commitment- Strategic CRM involves almost all the departments of an organization e.g. finance, sales, manufacturing, distribution, marketing etc. Hence it is essential to get support and use their important feedback while determining strategies. For this each and every department should be kept informed about all the developments and implementation of processes carried out or performed. Everyone should also be emphasized about the positive approaches and end results of the strategies. Building valuable project team- After organizational commitment is secured the next important stage in developing CRM strategies is building a determined and valuable project team. Each and every member of this team should be experiences and dedicated professional as these members will be the key decision makers in the whole process. They will be responsible to communicate all the related details and benefits of the CRM strategies to all the members of the organization. These members should be from following work groups to ensure all the aspects of strategies are addressed efficiently;

1. Management- Management professionals are responsible to provide motivation, leadership and management at every strategic development step especially when a change in business process or organizational structure is expected.
2. Technical- Automation of CRM strategies are important and must involve experienced technical hands. Also technical professional provide their useful contribution in building and managing software application and determining their compatibility with existing software features.
3. Sales and Marketing- These are final users of CRM system once the strategies are determined and implemented. The applied strategies are supposed to be successful once these users fell comfortable and satisfied by using all the CRM features. Being the end users these people are also responsible to provide useful feedbacks on efficiency and effectiveness while the strategies are in development phase.
4. Financial- The CRM strategies must also be gone through or evaluated under financial aspects. The financial professionals of the team can provide crucial analysis on assessment of enhanced productivity, evaluation of operational and production cost and final estimated cost of the project. They also help in assessing the investment cost per module or segment so that the product is delivered inside the budget.
5. External Experts- Many times some external consultants and other CRM vendors are substantially helpful in strategy development. These are people who are generally hired or outsourced for second fruitful opinion or if the organization is lacking with sufficient CRM experts. These professionals have vast experience in the same field and helps analyzing organization’s actual business needs, work with other professional to review and approve complex business structure and even helps in formulating the team members according to the expertise they posses.

Requirement Analysis- CRM strategies should always focus and concentrate on the actual business requirements. This process involves a series surveys and questionnaires with top level sales, marketing and financial managers to gather the actual expectations regarding the strategies to be implemented and what results these strategies will throw in the final stage. This is a very crucial factor in the development of an effective CRM system because if the results are not matching the actual requirement or if they diverge from focus points, then that means it’s not achieving the desired goals.

 

 

OPERATIONAL CRM

Operational CRM

---

 

Operational CRM is mainly focused on automation, improvement and enhancement of business processes which are based on customer-facing or customer supporting. The main importance of a CRM system lies on how the selling, marketing and service oriented processes are automated, and for which operational CRM systems are embedded with following major automation applications:

1. Marketing automation- As the name implies, marketing automation is basically focused on automating marketing processes. In marketing, campaign management involves marketers to use customer specific information to determine, evaluate and develop communications that are targeted to customers in individual as well as multilevel or multichannel environment. Campaigns developed to communicate customers individually are easy and involves unique and direct communications. For multichannel environment the implementation of marketing strategies and campaign management is quite difficult and challenging. For example, some retailers have multichannel transactions like shops or stores, wholesale stores, websites, home shopping and even television shopping. Here integration and implementation of communication strategy is difficult and evaluation of performance and quality of campaigns needs to be automated and should be technologically sound across each of the channels. For handling this, a CRM marketing strategy called event-based marketing is inherited. Using event based marketing communication and offers are presented to customers as and when they are required. For example, credit card customer calls the call center for inquiring the current interest rates, this indicates that customer is specific about the interest rates and is trying to compare the interest rates and may switch to different competitor to find specific deals which suits him. Without wasting time the automated CRM system pops up an event of offer which is best suited for that customer and helps to retain him back.
2. Sales-force Automation- A CRM system is not only used to deal with the existing customers but is also useful in acquiring new customers. The process first starts with identifying a customer and maintaining all the corresponding details into the CRM system. This process can be distributed into many stages which includes generation of lead and then qualifying those leads as prospects. The Sales and Field representatives then try getting business out of these customers by sophistically following up with them and converting them into a winning deal. Automation of selling process is efficiently handled by Sales-force automation which automates all the methodologies or sales cycle and above described process sophisticatedly.
3. Service Automation- Service automation deals with managing organization’s service. The actual interactions with customers such as contact, direct sales, direct mail, call centers, data aggregation systems, web sites and blogs etc. are examples of operational CRM. Each interaction with a customer can be collected to the client database generally known as ‘customer’s history’ and the information can later be used wherever necessary. Any one in the organization can have access to this information about customer which gives a clear view of customers needs and important information on the customer such as products owned, prior support calls etc. It naturally eliminates the need to obtain this information individually from the customer. On the basis of the information, if required, the customer can easily be contacted at right time at the right place.

Operational CRM refers to services that provide support for various ‘front office’ business processes in helping organization to take care of their customers. Focus on customers’ value is important for a successful operational CRM strategy. Different customers have to be treated differently so information on variables like customers’ ranking, actual value and potential value is of strategic value.

 

ANALYTICAL CRM

Analytical CRM

---

Analytical CRM supports organizational back-office operations and analysis. It deals with all the operations and processes that do not directly deal with customers. Hence, there is a key difference between operational CRM and Analytical CRM. Unlike from operational CRM, where automation of marketing, sales-force and services are done by direct interaction with customers and determining customer’s needs, analytical CRM is designed to analyze deeply the customer’s information and data and unwrap or disclose the essential convention and intension of behavior of customers on which capitalization can be done by the organization. Primary goal of analytical CRM is to develop, support and enhance the work and decision making capability of an organization by determining strong patterns and predictions in customer data and information which are gathered from different operational CRM systems. The following are the key features of analytical CRM:

• Seizing all the relevant and essential information of customers from various channels and sources and collaboratively integrating and inheriting all this data into a central repository knowledge base with a overall organization view.
• Determining, developing and analyzing inclusive set of rules and analytical methods to scale and optimize relationship with customers by analyzing and resolving all the questions which are suitable for business.
• Implementing or deploying the results to enhance the efficiency of CRM system and processes, improve relationship and interaction with customers and the actual business planning with customers.
• Combine and integrate the values of customers with strategic business management of organization and value of stakeholders.

Analytical CRM is a solid and consistent platform which provides analytical applications to help predict, scale and optimize customer relations. Advantages of implementing and using an analytical CRM are described below.

1. Leads in making more profitable customer base by providing high value services.
2. Helps in retaining profitable customers through sophisticated analysis and making new customers that are clones of best of the customers.
3. Helps in addressing individual customer’s needs and efficiently improving the relationships with new and existing customers.
4. Improves customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The power of CRM provides a lot of managerial opportunities to the organization. It implements the customer information in an intelligent way and creates views on customer values, spending, affinity and segmentation. Analysis is done in every aspect of business as described below:

1. Customer Analytics- This is the base analytic used to analyze customer knowledge base. It provides a better view of customer behavior and by modeling, assessing customer values and assessing customer’s portfolio or profiles and creates an exact understanding of all the customers.
2. Marketing Analytics- This helps discovering new market opportunities and seeks their potential values. It also helps in managing marketing strategies and scale and plan marketing performance at district, regional and national levels. Marketing analytics also focus on campaign management and planning, product analysis and branding.
3. Sales Analytics- Sales analytic provides essential environment to plan, simulate and predict sales volumes and profits by constantly analyzing organizational sales behavior. It helps in pipelining all the selling opportunities in an efficient way by indulging and improving the sales cycle.
4. Service Analytics- Analytical CRM has major role in enhancing the services which answering all the questions regarding customer satisfaction, quality and cost of products, complaint management etc. It even helps in improving and optimizing the services by sophistically analyzing the service revenue and cost.
5. Channel Analytics- This type of analysis helps to determine the customer behavior on channel preferences, like web channel, personal interaction, telephone channel etc. This information is efficiently integrated in customers’ knowledge base so that they can be contacted accordingly.

The essential results produced by Analytical CRM system could diversely help the organization to tackle customers’ based on values. It also helps in determining which customer is best to invest in, which can be treated at an average level and which should not be invested in.

 

 

COLLABORATIVE CRM

Collaborative CRM

---

Collaborative CRM deals with synchronization and integration of customer interaction and channels of communications like phone, email, fax, web etc. with the intent of referencing the customers a consistent and systematic way. The idea is not only enhancing the interactions but also to increase and improve customer retention and liberty. Collaborative CRM entangles various departments of organization like sales, marketing, finance and service and shares the customer information among them to highlight better understanding of customers. For example, the information of preferred products could be shared with marketing department so that analysis can be performed in this aspect to provide preferred products to customers. The information regarding varied cost or price of a particular product in market defined by customers can be delivered to finance department so that strategies could be created to match the product cost with similar products in market and after analysis bring an affordable and efficient product in market. The information regarding a specific service which is not installed in the company’s environment and intimated by the customers can be transferred to service

department to improve or install that particular service in-house. All this is done efficaciously within the range of channels so that the process automates the needs and minimal time is required for fulfilling these needs.

Collaborative CRM can be broadly identified by two aspects:

1. Interaction Management- This management process deals with designing the communication or interaction channel process within an organization which is specific to customer interaction and finally enhancing the extent of communication between both the parties. The communication channel depends on the customers’ preference on how they require the interaction to be dealt with. Some customers prefer to be contacted via phone and email because of more comfort ability or non availability of manual interaction due to no time or unavailability of resources. Some of them prefer to have live online meeting or web meeting to reduce the travel time and lack of time or may be they prefer more clarified real time environment by sitting at desk and transact. Some of the customers insist for agent conducted services which is often face-to-face interaction as they believe that this way is more efficient and conclusive. Depending on these channels of interaction it is very important for organization to fulfill these needs of customers and gather information from them and implementing it into the CRM before interacting to enhance the interaction power.
2. Channel Management- After analyzing and implementing the interaction medium it’s important to enhance the power of channels through which the customers are interacted. By using latest technological aspects for improving channel interaction could help to contact customers in an efficient way and gather information from them to help organization to understand the customers. Hence it is important for an organization to clearly arrange the channel responsibilities and duties.

Below are advantages of Collaborative CRM:

• Enables valued customer interaction across the channels.
• Entangles web or online collaboration to cut down service cost of customers.
• Integrates customer interaction with call centers to enable multi-channel interaction with customers and helps them make understand the overall process vales.
• Describes a view of integrated customer’s details during interaction to server them in a better way.

This CRM solution brings customers, process and strategies and data together so that organizations could serve and retain customers more efficiently.

Social Networks and CRM

 

Customer satisfaction is an integral part of company growth and success. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems offer businesses a way to keep current customers satisfied, as well as a way of finding new customers. Social networking can play a huge role in both these endeavors.

Many companies incorporate CRM systems in order to manage and organize all the contact it has with both existing and prospective customers, through software or Web-based approach that supports these ventures. For example, customer data and interactions can be entered, stored, and accessed by personnel based on several categories. The data then can be used to encourage better customer service with comprehensive information, and to improve targeted marketing. Social networking offers yet another channel to accomplish both of these goals.

This natural marriage between next-generation social technologies and enterprise platforms brings together a powerful tool for the ever-changing corporate world. Whether your business is large or small, the benefits are countless. For example, a large corporation can use social networks for providing better customer service to their already large customer base. A small company may use social networks to reach more people and spread the word of their products and services. In the end, the main goals are providing better customer service and attracting new customers.

While the list of social networking possibilities are many, here are a few examples of social networks being used for customer relationship management:

Facebook

* Create a profile page free of charge and tell everyone why your company is the best. On your profile page you add logos, videos of products, customer testimonials, and pictures.
* Facebook is all about meeting people and growing your friend list. Use this to your company’s advantage by accepting new friends, all while creating more business.
* On Facebook, you have a “wall” where customers can post comments and engage in dialogue with one another. This can also be useful when connecting with product representatives, and sister companies.
* Use the polls on Facebook to get quick information and opinions from your actual customers. This knowledge is extremely valuable when making decisions about your future.

Blogs

* Having the customer be a part of the conclusion/solution can ensure a satisfied customer, because he or she helped solve the problem.
* Communicating with the customer may help alleviate simple tensions, and resolve misunderstandings. Employees tend to feel less stress when customers aren’t explosive and unhappy.
* Social networking is in real-time, which allows companies to be responsive and accurate. Customers are used to being frustrated by being put on hold in call centers. Blogs can help resolve this problem by offering an easy way to be heard.
* Sometimes customers are more comfortable reaching companies in a way that makes them relaxed. A blog can offer a non-confrontational way to ask questions and make suggestions in a casual environment.

Facebook and blogs are just two examples of how social networking is advancing customer relationship management. In general, integrating CRM social networking can bring companies to the forefront of the business world. It helps companies reach customers in a safe, easy to use, and quick way. In a world where customers want results fast, bridging the two channels together creates an innovative way to approach customer service.