Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business philosophy which provides a vision for the way your company wants to deal with your customers. To deliver that vision, you need a CRM strategy which gives shape to your sales, marketing, customer service and data analysis activities. For most companies, the aim of a CRM strategy is to maximise profitable relationships with customers by increasing the value of the relationship for both the vendor and the customer.
Software solutions and new technologies may facilitate the new ways of working required by a CRM strategy but simply implementing a CRM product will not, in itself, deliver increased customer satisfaction. Instead, companies need to introduce new cross-departmental processes which allow them to complete the four steps in the CRM cycle: plan, interact, process, leverage – and then plan anew.
Many CRM applications tackle only one or two elements of the CRM cycle. As a result, a high proportion of CRM projects - which are based around implementing a particular package or suite of applications - fail to increase customer satisfaction, improve customer loyalty or deliver a return on investment for the supplier in the form of increased revenues or profits.
Any CRM initiative should therefore start with a vision and strategy which lays out the company’s aims and objectives. You must then adjust your processes and organisational structures so that they will allow you to execute that strategy effectively. These processes need to be underpinned by a CRM architecture which connects interaction channels with CRM applications and customer data repositories. Furthermore, your investment in CRM must encompass tools from all three solution domains - collaborative, operational and analytical CRM - if it is to support all four stages of the CRM lifecycle.
Our experience over many projects has allowed us to develop a CRM methodology and skillset which is enabling our diverseclient base to succeed with CRM. We can help you with short-term execution of specific projects and provide longer-term support as you devise and then roll out your complete CRM programme. Above all, we can help you really leverage your customer information so that you can deliver increased value to customers and continue to reap the benefits of your CRM strategy over the long term.
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