CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

CASE:

Never underestimate your Clients' Complaint, no matter how funny it might seem!

This is a real story that happened between the customer of General Motors and its Customer-Care Executive. Please read on.....

A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

'This is the second time I have written to you, and I don't blame you for not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of Ice-Cream for dessert after dinner each night, but the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive
down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem.....

You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice-cream, when I start back from the store my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds "What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?" The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the letter, but sent an Engineer to check it out anyway.

The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well educated man in a fine neighborhood. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came back to the car, it wouldn't start.

The Engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start.

Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man's car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end he began to take notes: He jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc.

In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than any other flavor. Why? The answer was in the layout of the store. Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. All the other flavors were kept in the back of the store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out
the flavor.

Now, the question for the Engineer was why the car wouldn't start when it took less time. Eureka - Time was now the problem - not the vanilla ice cream!!!! The engineer quickly came up with the answer: "vapor lock". 

It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other flavors allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man got vanilla, the engine was still too hot for the vapor lock to dissipate.

Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real and all problems seem to be simple only when we find the solution with clear and logical thinking.

Don't just say it is " IMPOSSIBLE" without putting a sincere effort....
What really matters is your attitude and your perception.

´Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to managing a company's interaction with current and potential future customers that tries to analyze data about customers' history with a company and to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth

Types of CRM

´Operational:The primary goal of customer relationship management systems is to integrate and automate sales, marketing, and customer support. Therefore, these systems typically have a dashboard that gives an overall view of the three functions on a single page for each customer that a company may have. The dashboard may provide client information, past sales, previous marketing efforts, and more, summarizing all of the relationships between the customer and the firm. Operational CRM is made up of 3 main components: sales force automation, marketing automation, and service automation.

´Analytical

The role of analytical CRM systems is to analyze customer data collected through multiple sources, and present it so that business managers can make more informed decisions. Analytical CRM systems use techniques such as data mining, correlation, and pattern recognition to analyze the customer data. These analytics help improve customer service by finding small problems which can be solved, perhaps, by marketing to different parts of a consumer audience differently.For example, through the analysis of a customer base's buying behavior, a company might see that this customer base has not been buying a lot of products recently. After scanning through this data, the company might think to market to this subset of consumers differently, in order to best communicate how this company's products might benefit this group specifically.

´Collaborative

The third primary aim of CRM systems is to incorporate external stakeholders such as suppliers, vendors, and distributors, and share customer information across organizations. For example, feedback can be collected from technical support call, which could help provide direction for marketing products and services to that particular customer in the future.

A good CRM should provide support for the following functions:

• capture and maintain of customer needs, motivations, and behaviors over the lifetime of the relationship

• facilitate the use of customer experiences for continuous improvement of this relationship

• integrate marketing, sales, and customer support activities measuring and evaluating the process of knowledge acquisition and sharing

CRM systems in practice

´Call centers

´Contact center automation

´Social media

´Location-based services

´CRM systems for business-to-business transactions

CRM ANALYSIS PROCESSES

´LEAD MANAGEMENT The focus of this process is on organizing and prioritizing contacts with the prospective customers. It involves integration with campaign management and service management, as well as customer profiling. A sub process of lead management is customer scoring, which uses quantitative and qualitative measures to rank the customer based on his or her interest in the product or service. This filtering process allows for more precise target marketing and it lowers the contact costs.

´CUSTOMER PROFILING The focus of this process is to develop a marketing profile of every customer by observing his or her buying patterns, demographics, buying and communication preferences, and other information that allows categorization of the customer. The knowledge generated from this process feeds into campaign management, sales management, service management, and the other processes discussed earlier. In addition, this process allows more individualized contact with the customer.

´FEEDBACK MANAGEMENT A good CRM requires a closed-knowledge management loop that consolidates, analyzes, and shares the customer information collected by CRM delivery and support processes with the analysis process, and vice versa. The loop can provide a road map for continuous improvement process for the company's products and services. A good system will discard unnecessary data and focus mainly on the knowledge useful for making better decisions.

CRM COMPONENTS

´MARKET RESEARCH

´SALES FORCE AUTOMATION (S FA)

´CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUPPORT

´DATA MINING AND ANALVTICS

´MARKET RESEARCH The two key functionalities here are campaign management and market analysis. Campaign management provides support for preparing such things as marketing budgets, ad placement, sales targeting, and response management. Marketing analysis tools provide statistical and demographic analysis, Web site traffic monitoring, and profiling tools. With the amount of data collected today these tools provide sophisticated segmenting and targeting capabilities in real time.

´SALES FORCE AUTOMATION (S FA) Sales force automation software has been around since long before CRM became a buzzword. Some of the current CRM vendors were originally in the SFA market. SFA tools provide basic functionality for sales personnel to automate sales lead distribution and tracking, sales reporting, pipeline management, contacts centralization and management, and group collaboration. In addition, they include such software for sales managers and executives as opportunity management, forecasting, reporting, analytics, and customizable dashboard capabilities so that they can be confident that their teams are producing at their full capacity. The goal of SFA software is to give businesses the upper hand with their sales data and to empower sales reps to spend more time selling and less time on administration.

´CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUPPORT The customer service function has gone through major changes since the advent of the Internet. Online help desks have become a common source for customers to find quick answers to complex technical questions. Customer service originally consisted of setting up a call center with access to a customer database and the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) Web site page. Today, with sophisticated CRM back-ends, companies have been able to consolidate the two areas into help desk support centers. Customer service functionality typicaUy includes help desk ticket management software, e-mail, interactive chat, Web telephony, and other interaction tools connected to a fully integrated customer database, which is connected to the supply chain management and ERP application. These tools can be accessed by a trained help center agent or by customers directly via the Internet.

´DATA MINING AND ANALTICS The amount of data being generated by the Web-driven business has been a driver for data mining and analytics functionality because it represents an extension of existing product lines rather than the creation of new ones. Such businesses as Amazon and eBay generate gigabytes of data per day, and even small Web sites easily generate megabytes of data. This data must be collected, sorted, organized, and analyzed for trends, demographics, cross-selling opportunities, and identification of other sales patterns. Sophisticated OLAP and data mining software are often integrated with CRM packages.