Question

Explain the overall objective of customer relationship management and the stages that customers are pulled through in the process. For each stage, identify the marketing goals during the stage as well as examples of strategies that may be used

Answer 1

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more.

A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship.

4 CRM Objectives And Goals To Set:

1. Improved Customer Satisfaction:

Happy customers are loyal customers and they also offer good word of mouth advertising, which can be invaluable. Making customer satisfaction the primary goal of your CRM campaign is the surest way to improve your bottom line. This can be achieved by fostering increased customer engagement via social networking sites and various mobile platforms. You can consider implementing surveys or creating an interactive blog. Actively soliciting feedback from your clients will help you determine which actions and activities will make them more content with the services or products they are receiving.

One of the major benefits in mapping out your CRM plan with increased customer satisfaction as your primary goal is the fact that all other goals and objectives will invariably support this effort. In this way, each method that you use or measure that you take will share a symbiotic relationship with the rest. As a result, all of your investments in CRM will be supporting your goals in a balanced and seamless fashion.

2. Improve The Efficiency Of Your Business:

CRM can help you eliminate redundancies in your marketing campaigns by allowing you to intuit which stage of the purchasing process each returning customer is in. You can send out marketing materials that are targeted to specific interests and purchasing abilities, rather than transmitting general messages that are far less likely to generate an optimal amount of attention. A good CRM platform will collect and organize a wealth of data pertaining to individual and group consumer profiles. Another part of these endeavors can be the implementation and use of knowledge management systems that increase the speed at which customer inquiries are addressed and problems are resolved. Greater levels of efficiency will also lead to improved client satisfaction.

This is additionally a very proactive form of reputation management, both online and off and thus, it is certainly a worthwhile goal to pursue. As an added benefit, some of the most innovative efforts to improve the overall efficiency of your business can also support the branding process. Showing yourself as being transparent, easy to connect with and ready to provide rapid support and services will foster the development of a strong and appealing brand image. Given that branding is one of the most costly and time-consuming aspects of building your business and garnering more attention for it, seeking to improve overall efficiency in a way that will foster a better reputation is a vital addition to your top CRM objectives and goals.

3. Expand You Customer Base:

It is important to note that CRM is not just for managing the customers you already have. A CRM program that is linked to a high-quality knowledge management platform will allow you to stay in contact with prospects that have yet to convert. It will also allow you to identify commonalities and relationships among the clients that you already have, so that you can hone and improve your future efforts in outreach. A larger customer base will allow for increased continuity in profits, even in a seasonal industry.

Having goals like this one as part of your CRM plan is also a great way to devise a system that is wholly self-supporting in the financial sense. By streamlining your marketing efforts for faster and increased conversions, you can cut costs in a number of areas while increasing your profits.Moreover, all of your new and most recent converts can be quickly funneled into a system that allows you to keep in touch and to keep your services and products fresh in their minds. This ensures that your CRM budget is never exhausted.

4. Enhance Your Sales And Support Teams:

One of the most important CRM objectives to consider is enhancing your team. By better learning the needs of the people you service, you can become increasingly adept in identifying the right talent to provide these services. Talent management software, HR management software and other cloud-based tools can help you increase the value of your trained employees. Much like your current customers, your talent is among your top assets. Whether CRM helps you replace undesirable additions to your team or gives you a framework for increasing the customer service skills of existing employees, it is certain to improve the benefits that hired workers are providing.

More importantly, CRM will give you a guideline for any professional development plans that you wish to implement and make mandatory among all employees. The data that your CRM system collects can be used as part of employee reviews and employee rewards or incentive programs. Tracking customer feedback in relation to the workers who have supplied customer service will allow you to make highly informed hiring, firing and promotion decisions. It will also give you an in-depth guide for sharing with any recruitment agencies that you are working with or for bolstering your own in-house recruitment teams.

Many companies are heavily reliant upon cloud-based and integrated systems. With knowledge sharing solutions, you can get optimal benefits from each and every aspect of these endeavors. Best of all, with goals that foster and support each other as the basis of this system, each of your investments in CRM is guaranteed to provide phenomenal returns. After having determined your CRM objectives and goals, you will need to start looking for the right tools and resources for bringing these to fruition.

The Three Phases of CRM:

Customer relationship management plays an integral part in a typical company's marketing system. CRM is a process of gathering and analyzing customer data, building precise marketing campaigns and managing relationships for optimized retention. These activities are performed over the three phases of customer acquisition, retention and extension or expansion.

Customer Acquisition:

Acquiring customers has always been the first important step in establishing business relationships. With CRM, advanced software databases are used to capture key customer data at the point of first contact. Profile data includes a prospect's name, address, phone number, email address and sometimes social media accounts. Entering this data into a computer enables future and ongoing communication access.

The other major benefit of starting a formal relationship with new prospects and clients is the ability to track their behaviors through data analysis. As of 2015, many databases enable analytics, the automated analysis of data through programmed tools. Salespeople can identify at any point in time, for instance, what percentage of customers are at each stage of the opportunity pipeline, or sales process. This knowledge allows for optimized targeting to avoid bottlenecks and to facilitate relationship-building activities.

Customer Retention:

The real purpose of gathering data on acquired customers is to improve retention rates. The typical customer attrition rate for companies is around 15 to 20 percent per year, but a 2013 Forbes article indicates that some industries experience significantly higher average rates. Effective data analysis, regular and systematic follow-up communication with contacts, and well-serviced accounts help you reduce your company's churn rate. Data analysis allows you to identify the traits of prospects and customers that offer the best lifetime earning potential as well, which enables greater focus on retaining core customers.

Customer Extension:

The customer extension phase of CRM includes activities intended to draw out the length of typical customer relationships, enabling greater revenue. A simple perspective is that satisfying a customer during one buying experience increases the likelihood of a follow-up visit. Over time, delivering quality solutions, following through on commitments and addressing problems convert a buyer into a loyal customer. You also can enhance revenue through add-on product selling and cross-selling, which involves recommending unrelated solutions. Because of the high costs of customer acquisition, extending relationships with customers already captured is hugely valuable for a business.

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