CRM- Building relationship with customers!

Service industry is getting stand with production and agriculture sector. But increasing competition within service sector and knowledge within customers demand more sparking approach to manage customers.

It is true that getting customer costs five times then retaining one. At the same time switching power of customer is also increased. Indian telecom sector is one of the best examples of market warfare and improvement in customer relationship.

Concept of managing relations with customers was evolved in 1980s but it was understood seriously 1997 – 1999 onwards. Today CRM is enabled with latest technologies and powered with Internet.

"CRM is an enterprise – wide mindset, mantra and set of business processes and policies that are designed to acquire, retain and service customers. CRM is not a technology. Technology is a CRM enabler. Technology based CRM offers sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service and to certain extend partnership relationship management too." - Scott Fletcher, VP, i2.

Richard Bach said on relationship " Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you."

Implementing CRM is becoming funding implementation for any IT service provider. But implementing technology without knowing consumer’s behavior impacts proves itself costly sometimes. CRM is an excellent if implemented after understanding customers. Thus there is a lot of scope for any research firm who deals with consumers and market directly or indirectly.

Providing contact centers, mail centers, call centers, portals, mobile based solutions and sales force automation will be sincere effort if your customers like understand it.

Relationship marketing is:
- to find your customers,
- to understand them,
- Keep in touch with them,
- Understanding and meeting their expectations and interest,
- to make loyal customers.

CRM however is beneficial in terms of :
- improving customer retention and loyalty,
- reducing cost of sales ,
- higher profitability by getting customers at lower costs.

Before building relationship, it is better to understand who is your customer?

There are seven types of buyers (customers) as per Dickision,

Loyal customers – who remain loyal
Opportunistic customers – believe in long term interests
Best deal buyers – believe in best deal
Creative buyers – who tell sellers their own review and demand exact product
Advertising buyers – need advertising as support tool to buy
Chisellers – Demand extra discounts
Nuts & bolts - believe in their own quality definition

Your customers can any one of above. While your representative reply emails or attends call at call centers, the understanding of such consumers is necessary to the large extend. Call center executive listens all types of different and vague complaints from various consumers where consumers really shout to put their grievances. At the same time call center executive attends top level executives putting their complaint in right manner. Thus creating infrastructure doesn’t help in CRM, training executives on basis of your market understanding is crucially needed.

On other side latest CRM packages is built on assumption to satisfy stakeholders. Customer means paying consumer/client, partner, supplier, and employee.

It is necessary to find out customers satisfied after implementation. Who are they? Or can your e-CRM efforts convert.

CRM’s basic question :- How to acquire customers?

Answer is understanding buying behavior of your customer.

Stimuli in the form both of the external environment and the elements of the marketing mix enter the buyer’s ‘black box’ and interact with the buyer’s characteristics and decision processes to produce a series of outputs in the form of purchase decisions.

Formula of building relationship with customer is to speak his / her language.

Buyer’s decision process is highly influenced by his / her characteristics, cultural, social, personal and psychological factors in background. Such background factors can be found through qualitative consumer behavioral research.

Marketing factors which are inputs in this process like product, price, advertising and distribution etc play crucial role. Understanding impact can be found through market study and analysis. Other inputs are macro factors e.g. environmental, economic, social, political and technological.

Research (Market & Consumer behavior) is key component for any successful CRM implementation.

Analytical CRM is an effort to understand customer better by capturing, storing, processing and interpreting customer data to a user (decision maker ).

"CRM is a business strategy to select and manage customers to optimize long – term value. CRM requires a customer – centric business philosophy and culture to support effective marketing, sales and service process. CRM applications can enable effective customer relationship management, provided that an enterprise has the right leadership, strategy and culture."
– CRMGuru.com