Customer Relationship Management; Culture, Features and Benefits

Managing Customer Relationships

When dealing with your customers, does your company's right hand know what its left hand is doing? Have you ever lost a sale to an existing customer because accounting tried to collect a late payment while your deal was in final negotiations?

And what about the cost of losing or acquiring customers? Studies have found that it costs up to 10 times more to acquire new customers than to retain old ones. Still more studies have shown that most customer defections to competitors are because of service issues, not products or pricing. An effective CRM strategy is a significant step in responding to these issues.

At a time when acquiring and retaining customers is more crucial than ever before, building customer satisfaction and loyalty is a key element of business success. Your ability to successfully manage relationships with customers, partners and prospects gives you a decisive advantage in markets crowded with fierce competition.

Your CRM solution must make the best use of ICTs to foster better business practices, facilitate effortless information exchange and enable you to effectively analyse, manage and synchronise sales, marketing and customer care across all points of contact.

CRM Strategy

CRM is an enterprise-wide strategy for presenting a single face to the customer. It responds to issues relating to sharing customer data and providing a seamless contact and fulfilment experience for the customer. CRM front-end applications usually integrate with back-end systems such as accounting and manufacturing for a true enterprise-wide solution.

3 Key Elements of CRM

CRM is a strategy based on organisational culture, enabled through the use of applications, technology and products that fulfil three essential requirements:

To give your enterprise a consistent and unified view of each customer whenever anyone deals with that customer. This knowledge increases the opportunity for sales and the effectiveness of customer service.
To enable your customer to have a consistent view of your enterprise, regardless of the way the customer contacts you. This improves customer satisfaction and customer retention.
To enable front office staff to perform sales, service and marketing tasks more efficiently as a team, increasing efficiency and reducing costs.

CRM describes a strategy used to manage and report customer/prospect/partner/contact interaction with enterprise contacts including sales, marketing, accounts and customer service and support.

When does “Contact Management” become “CRM”?

Contact Management applications focus on recording communications between an organisation and its customers and often include calendaring functions to enable appointments and reminders to be recorded. CRM is much more than this, and includes:

An enterprise wide implementation utilised by sales, marketing, customer service/support, accounting, etc.
Integrated with a back-end LOB system (Line of Business system including the ERP, vertical market or custom software system) providing significant customer data (YTD sales, recent invoices, etc.) to the CRM screens.