Customer Centric, CRM and Target Marketing

Posted in: Web Marketing by Jazz on July 23, 2009 | Comments Off

With increased competition and globalization, organizations realize the importance of knowing their customers and providing them with better service. In today’s dynamic marketplace survival depends on being able to effectively maintain and utilize long-term customer relationships.  With technology changing so fast and competition just a click away, simply offering a service or producing a product can no longer provide the competitive advantage. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is one of the systems that connects different parts of company; Sales, Marketing and Customer Services and can help with customer retention, increased sales and superior customer service.

A.                 What is CRM?

CRM is not just a software system or technology but a strategy that a company can implement to achieve its vision. CRM allows a company to be customer-centric and change its culture to support its vision. CRM software is one component of the customer centric strategy that provides the infrastructure to be more competitive and provide superior service to your customers.

There are three major functional modules of CRM:

·         Sales module provides ability to manage leads, convert them into opportunities, place orders , automate back office functionality such as credit checks, purchase orders and reports

·         Marketing module provides the ability to create campaigns, segment data into lists and track performance to calculate ROI

·         Customer Service module provides ability to answer customer enquiries, screen pop, manage customer problems and requests to effectively provide better service

B.                 Why organizations need CRM?

Customers need CRM to get better insight into customer behavior and modify their operations to ensure best possible service.

Some added benefits are:

·         Customer Retention: due to growth of internet, customers are a mouse click away going to competition

·         Customer Satisfaction: satisfied customers are less expensive to hold on to and focus on them can lead to increased customer retention

·         Customer Profiling: customer data is an asset and systems are needed to capture and warehouse it

·         Targeted Marketing: in order to do personalized marketing superior customer knowledge is needed

C.                 What CRM can do for them?

CRM as software provides a central database and a standard user interface used by all departments of an organization. It allows the various departments to share information and history of a customer. It allows an organization to implement business processes, enforce rules and automate functions.

D.                Expectation and Results:

Due the complexities of an organization and each company’s unique mix of people, processes and products a CRM implementation is generally challenging. Despite anticipated potential, the benefits from CRM are not seen quickly. This can be contributed to factors such as poor requirements, data and user adoption. Majority of implementations fail due to users not being involved in design and decision process, lack of training, technical and functional support, and lack of effort at management level to make everyone understand that the extra effort need to capture data in some cases can reap rewards for the whole organization.

E.                 Growth:

An industry study conducted in 2004 by the International Data Corporation and Cap Gemini showed that only 12% of large European and North American companies had completed CRM systems. The majority of them were first generation systems with focus on implementation for call centers and second generation system that focus on customer data analysis and customer linking activities were just emerging.

Another study in 2007 performed by T.H.G. Sales Automation in partnership with Microsoft Corporation with 20,000 large, mid-sized and small businesses revealed that 42% were using CRM and another 13% were in process of implementing it. In terms of growth for the rest of companies, 1 in 4 indicated that they were either buying or investigating either a new CRM system or upgrading it.