4 Top Tips for Improving Customer Relationship

Your old timers should be well looked after as they know the details of your product and services and can foresee
what the customer problems are really. You should manage relations carefully when you are dealing with lifelong
customers. They expect a lot more from you as they have been with you through thick and thin.

You should also be very picky about your lifelong customers as they are the ones that can also help your business
grow through referrals. From free offers to discounts and giveaways you should honor customer loyalty as every
customer loves to be pampered. You cannot expect them to expect less from you as they have been with you for
long. Usually many business owners make the biggest mistake of their lives by neglecting a long term customer.

Knowing about the customer is the greatest way to improving customer relationship. Whenever someone comes to
buy your product or service either at your brick and mortar establishment or online, you should get as much
information possible out of him or her. Knowing details about customers can help in servicing them better. When
you know their background a bit, you can also sense their preferences that help in tailoring the product and service
more toward them.

Improving customer relationship depends mostly on hands-on service. Even though times have changed,
customers still expect service like old times and being spoon fed.

There could be irate customers and some among them can complain regularly, but you need to satisfy their wants
and do as much as possible to go to them rather than make them come over or call up. Sending your sales rep to
resolve their disputes even before they ask is sensing their moods and getting into their shoes. Unless you think out
of the box and empathize with a customer, you do not do enough in improving customer relationship.

Customer relationship management

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This article is written like a personal reflection or essay and may require cleanup.
Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (September 2009)

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented

strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with customers and sales
prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business
processes—principally sales related activities, but also those for marketing, customer service,
and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new customers, nurture and
retain those the company already has, entice former customers back into the fold, and reduce
the costs of marketing and customer service. [1]

According to Forrester Research, spending on customer relationship management is expected

to top $11 billion annually by 2010, as enterprises seek to grow top-line revenues, improve the
customer experience, and boost the productivity of customer-facing staff.[2]
Contents
[hide]

• 1 Overview
o 1.1 Benefits
o 1.2 Challenges
o 1.3 Tools and Trends
• 2 Types/variations of CRM
o 2.1 Operational CRM
o 2.2 Analytical CRM
o 2.3 Sales Intelligence CRM
o 2.4 Campaign Management
o 2.5 Collaborative CRM
o 2.6 Consumer Relationship CRM
o 2.7 Simple CRM
o 2.8 Social CRM
• 3 Strategy
• 4 Implementation
o 4.1 Implementation Issues
• 5 Privacy and data security system
• 6 Market structures
• 7 See also

• 8 Notes and references

[edit] Overview
Once simply a label for a category of software tools, CRM has matured and broadened as a
concept over the years. Today, customer relationship management generally denotes a
company-wide business strategy embracing all customer-facing departments and even beyond.
When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and technology work in synergy to
develop and strengthen relationships, increase profitability, and reduce operational costs.[3]

[edit] Benefits

Customer relationship management tools have been shown to help companies attain these
objectives:[4]

• Streamlined sales and marketing processes

• Higher sales productivity
• Added cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
• Improved customer service
• Increased call center efficiency
 • Higher close rates
• Better customer profiling and targeting
• Reduced expenses
• Increased market share
• Higher overall profitability

[edit] Challenges

Tools and workflows can be complex to implement, especially for large enterprises. While
some companies report great success, initiatives have also been known to fail—mainly owing
to poor planning, a mismatch between software tools and company needs, roadblocks to
collaboration between departments, and a lack of workforce buy-in and adoption.[5]

[edit] Tools and Trends

Previously these tools were generally limited to contact management: monitoring and recording
interactions and communications with customers. Software solutions then expanded to embrace
deal tracking and the management of accounts, territories, opportunities, and—at the
managerial level—the sales pipeline itself. Next came the advent of tools for other customer-
facing business functions, as described below.

Perhaps the most notable recent trend has been the growth of tools delivered via the Web, also
known as cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS). In contrast with conventional on-
premises software, cloud-computing applications are sold by subscription, accessed via a
secure Internet connection, and displayed on a Web browser. Companies don’t incur the initial
capital expense of purchasing software; neither must they buy and maintain IT hardware to run
it on. For these and other reasons, the SaaS option has proven very attractive, and SaaS
applications have garnered a large share of the market. They are currently its fastest-growing
segment.[6] Leaders in this space include Salesforce.com, RightNow, and SugarCRM.

CRM technology has been, and still is, offered as on-premises software that companies
purchase and run on their own IT infrastructure. Prominent on-premises vendors include Oracle
Corporation, SAP AG, and Amdocs.

In 2009, SaaS represented approximately 20% of all customer relationship management

spending, and continued its trajectory of outselling on-premises software by a ratio of 3-to-1.[7]

[edit] Types/variations of CRM

There are several different approaches to CRM, with different software packages focusing on
different aspects. In general, Customer Service, Campaign Management and Sales Force
Automation (SFA) form the core of the system.

[edit] Operational CRM

Operational CRM provides support to "front office" business processes, e.g. to sales, marketing
and service staff. Interactions with customers are generally stored in customers' contact
histories, and staff can retrieve customer information as necessary.

The contact history provides staff members with immediate access to important information on
the customer (products owned, prior support calls etc.), eliminating the need to individually
obtain this information directly from the customer. Reaching to the customer at right time at
right place is preferable.

Operational CRM processes customer data for a variety of purposes:

• Managing campaigns
• Enterprise Marketing Automation
• Sales Force Automation
• Sales Management System

[edit] Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM analyzes customer data for a variety of purposes:

• Designing and executing targeted marketing campaigns

• Designing and executing campaigns, e.g. customer acquisition, cross-selling, up-selling,
addon-selling
• Analyzing customer behavior in order to make decisions relating to products and
services (e.g. pricing, product development)
• Management information system (e.g. financial forecasting and customer profitability
analysis)

Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of data mining and other techniques to produce
useful results for decision-making. It is at the analytical stage that the importance of fully
integrated CRM software becomes most apparent - the more information available to analytical
software, the better its predictions and recommendations will be.

[edit] Sales Intelligence CRM

Sales Intelligence CRM is similar to Analytical CRM, but is intended as a more direct sales
tool. Features include alerts sent to sales staff regarding:

• Cross-selling/Up-selling/Switch-selling opportunities
• Customer drift
• Sales performance
• Customer trends
• Customer margins
• Customer alignment
[edit] Campaign Management

Campaign management combines elements of Operational and Analytical CRM. Campaign

management functions include:

• Target groups formed from the client base according to selected criteria
• Sending campaign-related material (e.g. on special offers) to selected recipients using
various channels (e.g. e-mail, telephone, SMS, post)
• Tracking, storing, and analyzing campaign statistics, including tracking responses and
analyzing trends

[edit] Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM covers aspects of a company's dealings with customers that are handled by
various departments within a company, such as sales, technical support and marketing. Staff
members from different departments can share information collected when interacting with
customers. For example, feedback received by customer support agents can provide other staff
members with information on the services and features requested by customers. Collaborative
CRM's ultimate goal is to use information collected by all departments to improve the quality
of services provided by the company.[8] Producers can use CRM information to develop
products or find new market. CRM facilitates communication between customers, suppliers and
partner.

[edit] Consumer Relationship CRM

Consumer Relationship System (CRS) covers aspects of a company's dealing with customers
handled by the Consumer Affairs and Customer Relations contact centers within a company.[1]
Representatives handle in-bound contact from anonymous consumers and customers. Early
warnings can be issued regarding product issues (e.g. item recalls) and current consumer
sentiment can be tracked (voice of the customer).

[edit] Simple CRM

A relatively new spinoff of the traditional CRM model first appearing in 2006. At their core,
CRM tools are designed to manage customer relationships. As described above there are
countless supplemental features and capabilities. Simple CRM systems breakdown the
traditional CRM system to focus on the core values—managing contacts and activities with
customers and prospects. These systems are designed to create the most value for the
immediate end user rather than the organization as a whole. They often focus on satisfying the
needs of a particular marketplace niche, organizational unit, or type of user rather than an entire
organization.

[edit] Social CRM

Beginning in 2007, the rapid growth in social media and social networking forced CRM
product companies to integrate "social" features into their traditional CRM systems. Some of
the first features added were social network monitoring feeds (e.g. Twitter timeline). Other
emerging features include messaging, sentiment analysis, and other analytics. CRM experts[who?]
agree that online social communities and conversations have significant consequences for
companies, and must be monitored for real-time marketplace feedback and trends.

[edit] Strategy
Several CRM software packages are available, and they vary in their approach to CRM.
However, as mentioned above, CRM is not just a technology but rather a comprehensive,
customer-centric approach to an organization's philosophy of dealing with its customers. This
includes policies and processes, front-of-house customer service, employee training, marketing,
systems and information management. Hence, it is important that any CRM implementation
considerations stretch beyond technology toward the broader organizational requirements.

The objectives of a CRM strategy must consider a company’s specific situation and its
customers' needs and expectations. Information gained through CRM initiatives can support the
development of marketing strategy by developing the organization's knowledge in areas such as
identifying customer segments, improving customer retention, improving product offerings (by
better understanding customer needs), and by identifying the organization's most profitable
customers.[9]

CRM strategies can vary in size, complexity, and scope. Some companies consider a CRM
strategy only to focus on the management of a team of salespeople. However, other CRM
strategies can cover customer interaction across the entire organization. Many commercial
CRM software packages provide features that serve the sales, marketing, event management,
project management, and finance industries.

From this perspective, CRM has for some time been seen to play an important role in many
sales process engineering efforts.[10]

[edit] Implementation
[edit] Implementation Issues

Many CRM project "failures" are also related to data quality and availability. Data cleaning is a
major issue. If a company's CRM strategy is to track life-cycle revenues, costs, margins, and
interactions between individual customers, this must be reflected in all business processes. Data
must be extracted from multiple sources (e.g., departmental/divisional databases such as sales,
manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, finance, service etc.), which requires an integrated,
comprehensive system in place with well-defined structures and high data quality. Data from
other systems can be transferred to CRM systems using appropriate interfaces.
Because of the company-wide size and scope of many CRM implementations, significant pre-
planning is essential for smooth roll-out. This pre-planning involves a technical evaluation of
the data available and the technology employed in existing systems. This evaluation is critical
to determine the level of effort needed to integrate this data.

Equally critical is the human aspect of the implementation. A successful implementation

requires an understanding of the expectations and needs of the stakeholders involved. An
executive sponsor should also be obtained to provide high-level management representation of
the CRM project.

An effective tool for identifying technical and human factors before beginning a CRM project
is a pre-implementation checklist.[11] A checklist can help ensure any potential problems are
identified early in the process.

[edit] Privacy and data security system

One of the primary functions of CRM software is to collect information about customers. When
gathering data as part of a CRM solution, a company must consider the desire for customer
privacy and data security, as well as the legislative and cultural norms. Some customers prefer
assurances that their data will not be shared with third parties without their prior consent and
that safeguards are in place to prevent illegal access by third parties.

[edit] Market structures

The following table lists the top CRM software vendors in 2006-2008 (figures in millions of
US dollars) published in Gartner studies.[12][13]

2008 2008 Share 2007 2007 Share 2006 2006 Share

Vendor
Revenue (%) Revenue (%) Revenue (%)

Oracle 1,475 16.1 1,319.8 16.3 1,016.8 15.5

SAP 2,055 22.5 2,050.8 25.3 1,681.7 26.6

Salesforce.com 965 10.6 676.5 8.3 451.7 6.9

Amdocs 451 4.9 421.0 5.2 365.9 5.6

Microsoft 581 6.4 332.1 4.1 176.1 2.7

Others 3,620 39.6 3,289.1 40.6 2,881.6 43.7

Total 9,147 100 8,089.3 100 6,573.8 100

The following table lists of the top software vendors for CRM projects completed in 2006 using
external consultants and system integrators, according to a 2007 Gartner study.[14]

Vendor Percentage of implementations

Siebel (Oracle) 41%

SAP 8%

Epiphany (Infor) 3%

Oracle 3%

PeopleSoft
2%
(Oracle)

salesforce.com 2%

Amdocs 1%

Chordiant 1%

Microsoft 1%

Metus Technology 1%

SAS 1%
Others 15%

None 22%

A 2007 Datamonitor report[15] lists Oracle (including Siebel) and SAP as the top CRM vendors,
with Chordiant, Infor, and SalesForce.com as significant, smaller vendors.

[edit] See also

• Sales intelligence
• Business intelligence
• Consumer Relationship
System
• Customer Experience
• Customers
• Customer Intelligence
• Customer service -
contains ISO standards
• The International
Customer Service
Institute - contains
customer service
standards
• Data mining
• Database marketing
• Employee experience
management (EEM)
• Enterprise Feedback
Management (EFM)
• Enterprise relationship
management (ERM)
• Help desk
• Mystery shopping
• Open source CRM
software
• Predictive analytics
• Public relations
• Sales force management
system
• Sales process
engineering
• Support automation
• Web management
system
• E-crm

[edit] Notes and references

1. ^ Gartner, Inc. (6 June 2009) What's 'Hot' in CRM Applications in 2009
2. ^ Forrester Research (2008) Best Practices Adoption
3. ^ DestinationCRM.com (2002) What Is CRM?
4. ^ DestinationCRM.com (2002) What Is CRM?
5. ^ Effective CRM Consulting (2009) How to Avoid CRM Failures at Your Company
6. ^ SmallBizCRM (2009) Best Web Based CRM & Contact Management Solutions for Small
Businesses
7. ^ Gartner, Inc. (6 June 2009) What's 'Hot' in CRM Applications in 2009
8. ^ Edwards, John (2007-11-29). "Get It Together with Collaborative CRM". insideCRM. Tippit.
http://www.insidecrm.com/features/collaborative-crm-112907/. Retrieved 2008-02-01.
9. ^ Bligh, Philip; Douglas Turk (2004). CRM unplugged – releasing CRM's strategic value. Hoboken:
John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-48304-4.
10. ^ Paul H. Selden (1997). Sales Process Engineering: A Personal Workshop. Milwaukee, WI: ASQ
Quality Press. p. 23.
11. ^ Dyche, 2002, Managing Your CRM Project
 12. ^ Gartner, Inc (2008-09-12). "Gartner Says Worldwide Customer Relationship Management Market
Grew 23 Percent in 2007". Press release. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=715308. Retrieved
2008-08-15.
13. ^ Gartner, Inc (2009-06-15). "Gartner Says Worldwide CRM Market Grew 12.5 Percent in 2008".
Press release. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1074615. Retrieved 2009-10-27.
14. ^ Gartner, Inc. (22 June 2007) Commonly Deployed CRM Application Vendors in 2006
15. ^ Datamonitor (22 August 2007). Datamonitor suggests Oracle, SAP likely to remain atop CRM
market

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management"

6 steps from Customer Service

by Susan and Derek Nash

One of the ongoing challenges successful businesses face is in

optimizing customer satisfaction and developing Customer Relationship
Management. So many companies "jump on the bandwagon" of Custo
improving customer service in order to impact customer retention mer Relationship
levels. Yet, since 1994, customer satisfaction has dropped in nearly Management Experts
every sector of the economy according to the American Customer Susan and Derek
Satisfaction Index compiled by the University of Michigan. So why is
Nash
this? Raising customer satisfaction levels requires a comprehensive
systems approach. Susan and Derek Nash are joint
owners of EM-Power, Inc. a
This article will cover: consulting firm that works with a
wide range of Fortune 500
organizations implementing
1. The importance of a clear customer experience strategy customer relationship management
2. Selecting the correct people strategies and developing effective
leaders. They are authors of
3. Developing, motivating and managing your people "Deliver Outstanding Service", and
4. Establishing effective service delivery processes "Delighting your Customer" all
5. Building in continuous improvement published by How To Books.
6. Ensuring managers are the key change-agents
Contact Susan and Derek

Setting a Clear Customer Experience Strategy

Often organisations confuse defining a customer experience strategy with creating
a "slogan". How many companies create a slogan without any supporting
initiatives, thereby disillusioning employees and creating a "flavour of the month?"

To establish a good strategy certain key practices are required:

• Understand the overall organisational vision and mission

• Define the organisation's customer service direction, slogan and values
• Ensure customer service is defined as a key responsibility for the
business/department
• Share the customer experience strategy via a comprehensive
communications program
• Ensure that this strategy does not conflict with other business strategies. As
consultants, it is amazing how often we hear organisations say, "Improving
Customer Service is a priority, and we are also introducing stringent cost-
cutting measures." This can present a tough dichotomy.

Selecting the Correct People

It's really hard to teach an elephant to dance!

When recruiting employees to provide customer service, the process often tends to concentrate
more on functional expertise, technical competence and knowledge rather than interpersonal
skills. However, lack of the right attitude can drastically impact client satisfaction levels.
Research has in fact shown that attitude is the most important requirement: skills and functional
expertise can be taught.

Therefore in selecting the right people:

• Define the critical job requirements

• Develop scenario-based interviews/assessment centres to screen and select
candidates
• Involve multiple team members in the hiring process
• Ensure evaluation is based on objective, not the subjective "Be Like Me"
criteria

In part two of this article, we will look at the remaining four key principles of making the
transition from a customer service culture to customer relationship management.