Customer Relationship Management System is a Total Approach

Customer relationship management system or CRM is widely talked about now. There are also many CRM offerings in the market. Many of these confine themselves to specific tasks that cannot be described as a full CRM.

So what is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management is an Approach

CRM is not just a piece of software. After all, software is just a tool to do something. That something in the case of CRM is a total approach. Under that approach, profit and growth are equated with providing customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction occurs when the customer gets the same kind of acceptable response from all of a company’s interfaces - salespersons, support representatives, complaint responses, information requests, and so on. Because different departments and persons are likely to deal with the customer, it becomes necessary to have a consistent set of customer-focused policies throughout the organization.

Employees must be trained so that the customer gets a similar response from whoever in the organization the person approaches.

Major Components of Customer Relationship Management System

CUSTOMER INFORMATION: Information is the key to customer satisfaction. You must know what the customer wants - products, acceptable quality, product features, delivery methods, after sales support and other expectations. Getting such a comprehensive view of customer expectations requires systematic information gathering.

Information has to be gathered for different customer segments because expectations could differ from segment to segment. Information from different sources, such as different departments dealing with the customer, has to go to the same store. The information so accumulated has to be analyzed to provide insights into customer requirements by customer segment.

Customer relationship management system will record all information about a customer - orders, support requests, complaints, survey responses, payment practices and so on. This information can not only help profile the customer and the person’s preferences but also help company representatives respond meaningfully with the customer.

In a large organization, many persons might be dealing with one particular customer and each of these persons must know exactly what has gone before. The CRM system will have features that enable the person to retrieve the customer record and see the current status of any issues.

COMPETENCY DEVELOPMENT: To ensure that all employees provide a similar kind of experience to each customer, it is necessary to train the employees.

This training has to be backed by customer relationship experience. The database of customer information has to be analyzed and meaningful action plans have to be formulated to meet customer needs, and also to achieve the organization’s own goals. Employees will have to be trained in meeting the specific customer needs identified as above.

Competency development is an issue that has different dimensions. In addition to the analysis mentioned above, it has HR and compensation aspects. Employee training is an HR function and compensation schemes must motivate the employee to focus on providing satisfaction to the customer.

PERFORMANCE MONITORING: You start with a plan, probably a campaign plan directed at a particular customer segment. You then need to monitor whether the plan was implemented as intended. Furthermore, you need to measure the results of the implementation. Were desired results obtained from the plan?

Monitoring requires setting specific goals, accumulating actual performance using the same metrics, comparing plans and performance and analyzing any variations. To be meaningful, the analysis findings must also be used to develop better plans, policies and procedures.

Customer relationship management system is thus a set of tools and practices that help deliver desired results on customer satisfaction and company profitability fronts.

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