Is your firm equating CRM with technology packages that help to sift through large customer databases? CRM is about managing customer relationships and relationships are about personal involvement with people that evolve over time and not about technology. Therefore, organizations must refrain from being tactical and throwing technology tools at doing their CRM work for them. Strategic long-term development and management of customers embracing service encounters, service quality delivery, customer satisfaction, friendship, commitment, trust, and customer lifetime value should remain the focus of CRM. Consequently, firms need to innovate and offer their services across integrated multi-channel platforms from the feedback and listening engagements with their customers so that relationship building and retention should continue to improve and deepen.
Because customers’ satisfaction is a unique, non-repeatable and non-transferable experience which at best enables comparison to future consumption experiences, organizations need to track customer’s performance and interaction to gain insights on how best to serve them in building a long term relationship. Thus, the need for applications and software (CRM tools) that enable organizations collect and organize customer’s information to facilitate long-term relationship building, reducing cost of relationship maintenance, stimulating demand, activating inactive relationships, increasing profitability, and staying ahead of competition. A consequence of information overload often arises from the use of CRM tools especially in a consumer world of more awareness and constantly changing trends.
Sadly, there are huge financial investments involved in assembling CRM tools, requiring organizations to be strategic in their investments in CRM packages. Our cross-functional teams of experienced practitioners will work with you to provide result oriented execution context to your CRM planning and execution; help develop a process around customer relationship management that incorporates early signal detection that highlight challenges, opportunities, and communication and feedback. The CRM system evolved must have capabilities for discerning and segmenting the various customers’ portfolios to ensure that there is perfect match of strategies to particular relationship groups, and to CRM investments.