Value is the quality of product, the service, the convenience, the ease of use, the responsiveness, and the excellence of customer service. Value isn't just about the price of the product. A customer interacts with an organization in many ways, including shipping, distribution, and customer service.
The infrastructure provides the solid foundation, but the core competencies provide the heart and soul of a successful CRM system. It is here that the philosophy of CRM is expressed. The first vital core competency is the fine art of up-selling. Up-selling in a CRM environment means identifying your customer's needs and then matching their needs to complementary products and services. The result is a richer, more profitable customer relationship. One aspect of up-selling is event-driven marketing. By implementing up-selling software, you can track customer contacts and establish triggers to identify prospects for additional sales.
A second core competency of a successful CRM system is direct marketing. Direct marketing is the pre-sale interaction with potential customers. This involves the use of advertising techniques to influence and provide your customer with the information needed to make a purchase decision. As your business grows, you will be deluged with requests for information; be sure to manage the fulfillment end of this potentially overwhelming process.
The third core competency of a CRM system is customer service. The goal of an effective customer service program is to provide support and to assign, create, and manage service requests for the customer.
Walking hand in hand with the customer service is field operations, the fourth core competency. Field service is the hands-on extension of customer support. It comes into play when a problem cannot be solved over the phone.
In a nutshell core competencies of CRM are:
- Up-selling
- Direct Marketing
- Customer Service
- Field Operations
To involve the entire organization in CRM, you must be able to identify the benefits of such a system. What are these benefits? An effective CRM system will help you remain ahead in competition, tap into the world-wide market, instill loyalty in your customers, decrease cost, and increase profits.
Integrating a CRM system will help you decrease costs and increase profits, tap into the worldwide market, and remain ahead of the competition.
Effective sharing of client information throughout a company is the key ingredient for successful CRM.
Some examples of CRM information sources are:
The Internet:
Tracking visits to your website can give you a good idea of what customers are looking for some pages might get more hits than others indicating a demand for certain products. Using this information within a CRM framework will help you focus on customer needs.Customer Surveys:
Surveys can be given online or through the mail. An effective CRM system can take this information and make it available to marketers, sales people, and customer service people. With a clear understanding of customer needs, each department is more likely to meet those needs.Customer Purchasing Habits:
With data mining and other techniques, you can learn what your customers buy from you. What are your top selling items? Who's buying them? What isn't selling? Answers to these questions and more lie in customer purchasing habits.Customer Service Calls:
Anytime a customer calls you is an opportunity to learn more about him. A CRM system designed for your company can help service representatives increase knowledge of your customers.
The second way to understand your customers is to integrate customer information into your company's system. This allows everyone access to customer information. Marketers can identify customer demographics. Sales people can generate new leads based on customer buying trends. Customer service based on the information gathered.
The Internet is driving a revolution of one-to-one marketing and mass communications.
Effective sharing of client information throughout a company is a key ingredient for successful CRM. The first key to successfully implementing CRM is Integrating Internal Business Processes. Creating a seamless flow of information throughout your company isn't always enough. You should include external business partners in your information stream. Sharing customer information is essential to meeting your customers' needs. Consider third party suppliers and vendors as an extension of your business, and use them to provide solutions for your customers. A CRM infrastructure using Web-based applications can eliminate communication hassles and cost overruns.
To successfully create your own CRM infrastructure, you must integrate computer systems. Theses systems are known as “enabling technologies” that work together to provide more fluid CRM system.
With more powerful applications in the future, this integration might not be necessary, but because methods of delivering information is so varied, you need a CRM solution that can handle information across all delivery channels.
Legacy Systems:
Many companies rely on 20 year old systems that cannot simply be replaced. Because of this fact, special software tools, such as “middle ware”, become part of the CRM solutions. This software helps integrate old legacy systems with new CRM applications.Computer Telephony Integration (CTI):
CTI is used to manage incoming calls. It allows information about a caller to be entered into a CRM data repository. This information becomes a valuable part of the entire CRM process because it helps determine what solutions the caller requires.Data Warehousing:
With all the information gained through CRM, data warehouses become invaluable tools. Not only do they store the enormous amount of information you have gathered, but they also supply you with the material needed for customer research. Data warehouses offer customer data for later analysis.Decision Support Technology:
You need a way to analyze the information in your data warehouse. Decision support technology is a set of analytical tools that help you make decisions based on accumulated customer data. You won't get the most out of your CRM system without these tools.
