thinkaboutcrm.com's blog

Relationship building is the central theme of CRM. It lays the foundation for building a loyal clientele. Retaining an existing customer always works out cheaper than adding new customers to the existing customer base. Customer loyalty is nurtured over a period of time by making intelligent and sensitive use of data generated from your CRM systems.

A good word spoken by a satisfied customer is worth hundreds of dollars of advertising. At the same time, a disgruntled customer can do serious damage to your reputation. Prevention is better than fire-fighting. There is always a reason why a customer acts difficult. Know the reasons and treat each customer accordingly.

CRM software is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg that is customer relationship management. The basics of CRM do not change. The human angle to it is all important and it is these good old-fashioned virtues that decide the success of your CRM initiative.

There are some strict no-no’s that you should be aware of with reference to offering customer service. The key is to keep the negatives out and accentuate the positive. Remember never say “we never”, “we don’t”, “we can’t”, “you’re wrong” or other such phrases.

So you run a business and you wish to select a CRM solution that is a perfect fit for your company. There is a plethora of CRM alternatives out there, you need to select the best based on a few criteria. You have to be in a position to ask the right questions so that you can get the required information about software capabilities and vendor appropriateness.

Consider the following points:

• What are your prime requirements; targeted marketing, customer retention, adding to the customer base, business intelligence, or a combination of these

Customer experience management or CEM is the next evolutionary step for CRM. With CEM, the focus is on customer experience rather than on operational practices. A “customer centric” attitude is central to making use of the data generated. A CEM strategy aims to involve the top-level management at every level so that the practices implemented are not purely market- or operations driven. Every interaction with the customer is viewed as an opportunity to learn more about his preferences, his lifestyle, and what drives his purchase decisions.

One of the oft cited facts about CRM is that it is most effective when you exceed customer expectations and the best way to do it is by providing proactive customer care. One of the great things about proactive customer care is that it does not let problems arise so that time and effort spent in problem solving is less. Needless to state that customer satisfaction with a business is greater when transactions happen without ever having to resort to calling the contact centers.

Continuing from the earlier post, here are a few more points that CRM vendors are loath to discuss:

• Organizational co-ordination does not come easy. Departments can often be loath to align their operations to meet system architecture requirements. A smooth deployment requires co-ordination otherwise piecemeal deployments can throw the process off kilter. Companies also need to ensure that their key officers and managers stay involved with the deployment till the end, if one happens to leave mid-way, getting the right replacement can be a tedious process.

Although CRM spending is increasing by the day, there is some concern regarding the rate at which CRM deployments are failing. This two-part piece aims to bring out the issues that CRM vendors are loath to talk about.

• A CRM deployment can be a major resource guzzler through its entire lifespan. Costs include cost of software, deployment expenses, customization costs, upgrade costs, licensing costs, cost of lost productivity during implementation, cost of educating the user staff, hardware and equipment costs and costs of maintaining an IT staff for running the CRM.

Web-based CRM has come on very strongly as a viable alternative to on-premise CRM. This is great news for SMBs who earlier could not afford on-premise CRM because of its prohibitive costs.

Some of the advantages of a web-based CRM system for an SMB include: