What does CRM really mean?

Most marketing and sales organisations claim to have a CRM strategy of one sort or another but very few truly understand what it really means and how to implement it.

Customer relationship management is a term that refers to practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyse customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention and driving sales growth.

Research conducted by Google and CEB indicates that customers that are emotionally connected to a brand are twice as likely to purchase a product or service, and are four-times as likely to defend their purchase decisions.  Customer satisfaction has important implications for the economic performance of firms because it has the ability to increase customer loyalty and usage behaviour and reduce customer complaints and the likelihood of customer defection.

So how do you develop a CRM strategy?

A CRM strategy must look holistically at the business processes and systems that deal with customers, including marketing, sales, ordering, customer support, technical support and business intelligence/customer analytics.

• Understand the issues that you currently face when interacting with your customers. Do you provide a seamless experience for your customer regardless of experience?
• Identify and document your customer journeys across the organisation. A customer journey is how your customer interacts with your business (email, telephone, support desk).
• Define your objectives – sales, marketing and customer support.
• Break these goals into achievable objectives and then map out how and when you plan to complete these steps (implementation plan).
• Involve your employees in every step of the process. Educate them as to their role.
• Develop or select the appropriate software to support the CRM strategy of the organisation.
• Develop a communication and channel program for customers.
• Identify how you will measure success.
• Evaluate, measure and improve.

The benefits of a successful CRM program include improved customer knowledge, better responsiveness to customers’ needs, customer segmentation enabling enhanced ability to target profitable customers, marketing customisation, and enhanced sales force efficiency and effectiveness.