Communicating with customers, learning what they want and responding
accordingly are all part of building a long-term relationship. In
our latest provocative discussion, 3 experts on customer relationship
management (CRM) share their views on cultivating and retaining clients.
Got a question for our roundtable? E-mail us at special.sections@newsweek.com. |
Say "customer relationship management" (CRM) and most people probably
think of software packages that help companies track and keep in touch
with customers. While technology plays an integral part in CRM, the
practice of building long-term relationships is more involved than
that, and includes everything from how you communicate with your customers
to learning what they want from you and responding accordingly. Here,
three CRM experts share their views on cultivating and keeping long-term
customer relationships. |
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| Q What should businesses remember when
building a successful CRM program? |
Brent Leary: It's more of a business philosophy
than a technology. What kind of relationships do you want to
have with customers? How do you find the right customers? Once
you've targeted good prospects, how do you have a process in
place that will help you win more than you lose? It's about
helping your people go through the right steps and activities
to close business.
Jill Dyché: Your technology should do
three things: It should automate better business processes that
touch the customer, like the sales process. It should mirror
strategic business requirements, so if one of your strategies
is to increase customer retention, the program should do that.
And it should enable you to measure how well you've done relative
to your objectives.
Sharon Dill: It's a combination of software
and process, and the process is to look at the software before
you pick up the phone. As a customer service rep, you should
know everything you can about that customer before you pick
up the phone, because you may be able to answer other questions
or identify other opportunities to help the customer. |
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| Q: What, in your opinion, is the
most important element of a successful CRM program? |
| Dyché: The most important element
is data. Each piece of data helps us better understand who our
customers are, how they're behaving, what their characteristics
are and how that is driving business. |
| Dill: A successful CRM program needs to be
in one central location, in real time and web-based. |
| Leary: When you think of CRM, you think of
your customers. You want to have them included, but you also
need the employees who are doing the face-to-face interaction
to close business, to define opportunities. When you get the
right people [customers, employees, distributors and other stakeholders]
together, you can figure out if some of the processes need to
be tweaked. You use the collective information to determine
the best technology and the best solutions. |
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| Q: What should we be watching
on the CRM horizon? |
| Dill: Metrics-methods of measuring the success
of the program, whether they're sales figures or some other
measure. One side of CRM is the warm and fuzzy side, interacting
with people. The other side, which fewer people talk about,
are the sales figures. We're a scuba diving company, so we look
at certifications. I feel that we have opportunities to link
metrics to the sales/certification figures directly into software
products. |
| Leary: The on-demand CRM model, which allows
companies to concentrate on their core capabilities and processes
without having to worry about maintaining servers and hardware.
Through these service providers, companies of all sizes can
have complex and automated CRM strategies, allowing everyone
to compete in ways that they have not been able to. Your people
need access to data on the go, so look for more ways that will
be happening. |
| Dyché: Customer data integration,
which is a new tech trend. Basically, it combines technology,
processes and pretty sophisticated algorithmic functionality.
It takes data from various areas within the organization, possibly
even combining it with external data sources, so that we can
identify customers as individuals with individual preferences
and conduct our relationships accordingly. |
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