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 multi-dimensional 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
company. Better Management presents extensive resources on
Customer Relationship Management topics to help you develop
strategies for optimizing your customer relationships.
Goals of CRM
1) Grow customer revenue and profitability over time.
2) Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by providing
better customer service.
3) Optimize management of customer life cycles.
4) Improves the efficiency of your sales and technical staff.
5) It allows easy access to customer service records, contact
information, assigned assets and sales development.
Customer Relationship Lifecycle
There are three major areas that focus on customer satisfaction,
1) Sales.
2) Marketing.
3) Service.
The professional sales force predicts and proposes the real-time
analysis of information and distributes this information to the
company and business partners. Marketing concentrates on
personalizing customer preferences and offering them satisfying
experiences. Service is associated with the companies' call
centers and coordinates interaction between web, e-mail, and
other communication Medias.
Customer Management Tools
1) E-mail, telephone, and postal mail.
2) The Internet should be one of your primary tools for sales
research. News articles, financial statements, and the company
web site are often excellent indicators of what kind of business
your customer is really doing.
3) Promotional materials like a mouse pad or t-shirt with your
company name will serve as a subtle 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 appear 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 over $10 million. License fees for a
typical web-based CRM solution range from 60-$80/month per user.
However, the major costs associated with CRM are not the license
fees, but the time an organization spends keeping the CRM system
current. With many CRM solutions, the value of the time invested
keeping the system current is 10X the CRM license fees. Low user
acceptance is often challenging 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 causes CRM projects to fail?
The lack of a communication between everyone in the customer
relationship chain can lead to an incomplete picture of the
customer. Poor communication can lead to technology being
implemented without proper support or buy-in from users. For
example, if the sales force isn't completely sold on the
system's benefits, they may not input the kind of demographic
data that is essential to the program's success. One Fortune 500
company is on its fourth try at a CRM implementation, primarily
because its sale force resisted all the previous efforts to
share customer data.
Current Developments and news of CRM
Conclusion
Customer relationship management today is about tracking and
analyzing explicit information on current customers as well as
sales prospects. CRM software needs to be deployed in a
rigorous, disciplined, coordinated manner to achieve any
promised potential.
Source: Zeeshan Haider
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