Customer Relationship Management - A Successful strategy
requires a holistic approach
CRM
initiatives often fail because most of the implementations are
limited to software installation without providing the
appropriate motivations for employees to learn, provide input
and take full advantage of the IT system deployed.
From the outside, customers
interacting with a company perceive the business as a single
entity, despite often interacting with a variety of employees in
different roles and departments. CRM is a combination of
policies, processes and strategies implemented by a company that
unify its customer interaction and provides a mechanism for
tracking customer information.
CRM includes many aspects which
relate directly to one another:
- Front office operations -
Direct interaction with customers, e.g. face to face
meetings, phone calls, e-mail, online services etc.
- Back office operations -
Operations that ultimately affect the activities of the
front office, e.g. billing, maintenance, planning,
marketing, advertising, finance, manufacturing etc.
- Business relationships -
Interaction with other companies and partners, such as
suppliers/vendors and retail outlets/distributors, industry
networks (lobbying groups, trade associations). This
external network supports front and back office activities.
- Analysis - Key CRM data
can analyzed in order to plan target marketing campaigns,
conceive business strategies and judge the success of CRM
activities (e.g. market share, number and types of
customers, revenue, profitability etc.).
Types of
Variations
Following are
are several different approaches to CRM
Operational CRM
Operational CRM provides
support to front office business processes, including sales,
marketing and service. Each interaction with a customer is
generally added to a customer's contact history, and staff can
retrieve information on customers from the database when
necessary.
Operational CRM processes
customer data for a variety of purposes:
- Managing Campaigns
- Enterprise Marketing
Automation
- Sales Force Automation
Sales Force Automation (SFA)
SFA is a type of Operational
CRM that is designed to automate sales-force-related activities,
such as lead tracking. Software products perform such tasks as:
- Keeping lists of leads
- Assigning list segments to
salespeople
- Allowing list contacts to
be called or e-mailed
- Tracking responses
- Generating reports
- Creating leads for the
team
Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM analyzes
customer data for a variety of purposes:
- Design and execution of
targeted marketing campaigns to optimize
marketing effectiveness
- Design and execution of
specific customer campaigns, including customer acquisition,
cross-selling,
up-selling,
retention
- Analysis of customer
behavior to aid product and service decision making (e.g.
pricing, new product development etc.)
- Management decisions, e.g.
financial forecasting and customer profitability analysis
- Prediction of the
probability of customer defection (churn analysis)
Sales Intelligence CRM
Sales Intelligence CRM is very
similar to Analytical CRM, but it is intended as a more direct
sales tool. Features include the delivery of "alerts" to sales
people to identify:
-
Cross-sell/Up-sell/Switch-sell opportunities
- Customer Drift
- Sales performance
- Customer trends
- Customer margins
Campaign Management
Campaign management software is
marketing-oriented CRM software that combines elements of
Operational and Analytical CRM and allows campaigns to be run on
an existing client base. Campaign Management is used when you
need to create personalized offers when it is prohibitively
expensive to personally contact each client. Campaign management
software functions include:
- Choosing campaign
recipients from the client base according to selected
criteria
- Development of a campaign
offer (this is often done "out-of-the-system" and is not
automated)
- Assigning specific
campaign offers to selected recipients
- Automatically sending
offers to the selected clients via selected channels (either
directly, via channels such as e-mail, or indirectly, by
creating lists for use in channels such as direct mail)
- Gathering, storing, and
analyzing campaign results (including tracking responses and
analyzing propensities)
Collaborative CRM
The function of the Customer
Interaction System or Collaborative Customer Relationship
Management is to coordinate the multi-channel service and
support given to the customer by providing the infrastructure
for responsive and effective support to customer issues,
questions, complaints, etc.
Collaborative CRM aims to get
various departments within a business, such as sales,
technical support and marketing, to share the
useful information that they collect from interactions with
customers.
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