Empower customers by making ordering, bill payment, accessing account information, and issue resolution painless.
Alert customers to specials offers on their favorite items or products that would enhance what they currently own.
Allow "channel choice," by letting customers interact with the company however they are most comfortable: in person, over the phone, via e-mail, or through a website.
Ultimately, make the customer feel like they are an important part of the company they do business with. This increases loyalty, referrals, and the customer's lifetime value to the company.
Marketing and CRM Tools
A happy, profitable customer is the end result of all CRM. The back-end technology and support is vital for a well-functioning system, but too often in discussions of CRM Tools the customers is the last consideration, instead of the first.
Think of the way that consumers find a company, choose to do business with that company, and stay with the company.
Any business that leaves customers finding them to dumb luck probably won't stick around long enough to make discussing them worthwhile. Most businesses smart enough to think about CRM Tools are probably thinking seriously about marketing, and how to best use precious marketing dollars to find customers and help customers find them.
The unified view of the customer, one of the main goals of CRM Tools, starts the moment someone responds to a marketing campaign. This can be a customer walking into a store with a special coupon, calling a toll-free phone number to inquire about an offering, or clicking a link in an e-mailed newsletter.
As the customer weighs their purchasing decision, the features that they ask about, their concerns, and their buying preferences are all valuable pieces of insight. Even if the customer doesn't buy on their first interaction with a company, knowing what they are looking for will help in crafting a more effective marketing message next time.
Keep Customers Happy
Once a consumer has made their purchasing decision-often by a long and winding route and after many interactions noted in the Customer Relationship Management system-it's vital to keep that customer for as long as possible. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most important is to make sure the customer isn't unhappy. It's not always clear who is pleased with a service or product, but it is usually clear who isn't.
Many CRM Tools have a knowledge base so that customer's issues can be quickly resolved when they contact the company with a problem. CRM can not only save the company money by efficiently resolving service issues, but helps the consumer feel that their needs are being met, and that their problems are taken seriously.
Quick, accurate resolutions to problems are good for everyone, and save the company negative word-of-mouth. Case tracking tools, part of some CRM tools, ensure timely follow-up to problems that don't have an immediate fix.
Staying aware of the customer's needs and buying habits as the relationship matures helps a company see how much it cost to acquire that customer, how much it costs to keep them, and the potential lifetime value of that customer.
Bird's Eye View
A CRM tool is designed to manage and optimize every single customer-company interaction, but a good solution often includes what's called analytics, to give a bird's eye view of this busy landscape. The analytic capabilities of CRM solutions can give product managers into what features are most important to consumers, and what features they don't understand. Marketing managers are able to segment the customer base to better understand what demographic groups are using the product, and why.
Advanced CRM tools sometimes take this "big picture" power of CRM one step further with predictive analytics. Predictive analytics can help a company stay a step or two ahead of the competition by sensing the initial tremors in seismic market shifts.
Small spikes in activity are often (rightly) overlooked as part of the ebb and flow of a fickle marketplace, but the ability of a forward-looking CRM solutions to sound the alarm when it "notices" that seemingly unrelated events are brewing into a perfect storm is CRM at its best.
Many Paths, One Destination
To harvest the benefits and tools of CRM, companies can use solutions that are completely online, completely in-house, or a mixture of both. CRM on demand lets a company capitalize on CRM quickly and easily; free online demos let companies try before they buy. In-house solutions take more time to implement, but make up for the higher upfront costs in time in money with more industry-specific customizations and are more "rooted" in a company's technical infrastructure and corporate culture. Some vendors allow a company to quickly ramp-up online, and then effortlessly bring some or all of their CRM functions in-house.
Regardless of how CRM is delivered, the multi-department job getting and keeping customers should be dramatically easier once it arrives. There is enough variety in CRM solutions out there, from lean and mean products for small businesses to massively powerful enterprise packages that touch almost every single function in the company, that it's really just a matter of envisioning the end-point and deciding what tools a company needs to make a happy customer happen.
