See more articles in this blog

CRM Blog

Developing the business's most valuable asset

Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice  :  28 August 2009 / 11:29 AM  :  1

For the reasons brought forward before, building a valuable customer relationship and developing customer loyalty is a top priority in business today — but it is a priority that can be difficult to execute without the right approach.

Perceptions of businesses are created, positive or negative, during every interaction the customer has with the business.

Leading businesses therefore collect and analyse relevant information about all interactions very effectively and apply this knowledge about their customers to develop and improve each customer’s experience. These businesses concentrate on their most valuable customers – the customers with the highest lifetime value.

They know that being a leader in knowing their customers translates into customers staying longer, buying more, recommending their products to others, and paying a premium price for value. In brief: intimate knowledge of customers is the key to customer loyalty and maximising profits.

Front office – like CRM – functionality is critical to a company’s ability to provide value at every customer touch point, like direct contact, catalogue, call centre, corporate web site, and others like social networking sites, which become increasingly more important. Just as critical is the tight integration of the front office with the back office and e-business solutions. The e-business solutions are one of the important channels for customers to interact with the company whereas the ERP in the back office delivers invaluable additional information about the same customer.

Tight integration of systems offers the potential of cost reduction by streamlining processes in addition to the positive impact on the revenue of modelling customer centricity into the business. Tightly integrated systems enable interlocking customer facing and internal business processes to optimally use available resources and data.

While there is no fixed recipe, all it takes is a short series of simple steps to get there. Leading companies:

• Use the data about their customers that they generate with every interaction to build a 360 degree view of their customers. To do this they integrate their customer data from disparate systems into one single, integrated CRM solution, like SAP CRM.
• Demonstrate consistency across and integration of channels. Customers are getting more and more information about companies and products, anywhere and anytime. They expect consistent information and corporate behaviour regardless of the channel they use.
• Use the detailed information they have about their customers to segment them appropriately in order to be able to provide all customers with high value – the right products and services – while focusing on their most valuable customers
• Ensure that new information is immediately fed into the CRM system in order to be available for the other channels without delay.

Conclusion

The time to focus on a CRM strategy that embraces the customer is now. With a smart and strategic reaction to current economic difficulties that includes pursuing their CRM goals while containing costs businesses are able to reap opportunities now and to gain a considerable advantage when the economy turns up. The customer centric strategy can be implemented step by step using a powerful and scalable integrated CRM solution that evolves with the business needs and is the cornerstone for gaining customer insights, using this data efficiently to maximise profits.

Posted in CRM on 28 August 2009
More by this author

Tagged: CIO  CRM  Retail  Social Networking  

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 Comment

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Post a comment