What is CRM
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[edit] What is CRM? An overview of CRM
As CRM has different meanings to different organizations and individuals, few concepts have generated such vagueness before. Recently, while at a partner meeting for a well known accounting system, they were introducing their CRM add-on for their system. The speaker posed the question, “What is CRM?” expecting a concise answer to his own question, I was rather surprised to hear his reply, which as, “I don’t know.”
The concise answer to the question is: CRM is a business strategy and it is important to understand that first foremost that CRM is business strategy. CRM is a business strategy that is designed to provide your customers with a valuable and consistent experience throughout your organization.
[edit] What is not CRM?
CRM is not a software package that you can buy off the self. Nor can you go online, enter your credit card number onto a website and subscribe to CRM. While there are many software tools that will help you implement a CRM strategy, these are certainly not “CRM”.
Contact mangers, sales process automation, marketing management, service management, campaign management and scheduling may be parts of a strategy to implement CRM, but they are the means to achieving a CRM strategy.
[edit] “The Customer is Always Right”
The old adage, “The Customer is Always Right”, coined in the early 20th century, wasn’t intended to be taken literally. The intention was to make the customer feel special by instilling into their staff the temperament to act as if the customer was right, even if they weren't. By making the customer feel special, they would build customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is when a customer feels there is more value in giving your organization their business rather than your competition. And, this is the main concept behind CRM strategy.
[edit] Elements of CRM
Tools designed to support a CRM strategy have made significant progress. Once an organization maps out their CRM strategy, they can then implement it in Microsoft CRM. Microsoft CRM contains all the elements needed to implement a successful CRM strategy.
- Sales Management
- Marketing Management
- Customer Service
- Workflow Management
[edit] Sales Management
The process of managing sales entails all aspects that range from the inception to closing of the sale. When implemented properly, CRM is a tool that sales people will want to use, and as a by product will generate management reports that sale people don’t like to produce.
- Managing accounts and contacts
- Prospecting leads
- Lead qualification
- Opportunity tracking
- Quotes
- Sales orders
- Sale closure
- Tracking correspondence with customers
- E-mail campaigns and success tracking
[edit] Marketing Management
By targeting your customers with information that is relevant and useful to them you organization can produce more effective campaigns. CRM tools enable you to take your customer lists and evaluate for the purpose of developing sectors for targeted messages.
Analysis of campaigns is key to the CRM strategy, enabling your organization to react to the effectiveness of a campaign. CRM tools link marketing and sales which allows your organization to track campaign effectiveness.
CRM marking management will include all campaign phases:
- Planning
- Creation
- Execution
- Management
- Tracking
[edit] Customer Service
Implementing a customer support policy is an important aspect of CRM strategy. Ensuring that your organization can address your customer’s needs is paramount. There is nothing more frustrating for a customer than traversing phone maze just to end up with in the wrong department or worse, not getting the problem solved.
CRM is about getting the right answer to your customers as quickly as possible. Routing requests, assigning them to the right department or people with automated escalation can ensure that your organization does not let your customer’s requests fall through the cracks. CRM can provide:
- Case Management
- Call routing
- Queue Management
- Call tracking
- Entitlement Processing
- Problem resolution
- Performance Management
- Logging and Monitoring
[edit] Who is CRM for?
CRM is right for all organizations. From the one man shop all the way to Fortune 500 firms. CRM is for organizations that need to get an accurate picture who their customers are and their customer’s needs during their life with the organization.
[edit] Single Person Shops
Most successful one person businesses implement CRM without even thinking about it, and often without any sophisticated software. They know their customers and often enjoy a good rapport with them. A day planner and contact book maybe all these individuals need to implement a strategy that puts the customer first. Remembering dates that are important to their clients, who knows who in the industry, and following up on issues comes as second nature to these individuals, therefore they prompt healthy relationships with their customers. And, they may do it with something as simple as paper and pen or using Microsoft Outlook alone or with Business Contact Manager.
[edit] Small and Medium Organizations
Organizations with more personnel may need to use tools that are more sophisticated to keep everyone on the same page. Small organizations can benefit greatly by implementing a CRM strategy enabling individuals in the organizations to specialize while at the same time being “kept in the loop”.
For example, a customer leases a care for three years. The dealership wants to stay on the customer’s radar for those three years. Sending out birthday or holiday cards is one way of doing that. The service department can send out reminders for routine maintenance. If the customer brings the car in for repair, a follow up call from the salesperson to ensure customer satisfaction can make the customer feel very special.
Restaurant chains that give free meals on their customer’s birthdays is one way they give their customers individual attention.
[edit] Large Organizations & Enterprises
When we get to this level of an organization, we are dealing with various departments. And, often at the enterprise level there will be multiple departments with the same role. For example, there may be a marketing department for each business line or locale.
A CRM strategy helps these organizations ensure that their customers feel like an important individual to your organization. Each point of contact that a customer has with your firm can be tracked and associated with your customer, whether it is an e-mail, phone call, letter or web site form. When the customer calls, your staff will have access to the information and preventing the customer to recite their history. This prevents frustration on the customer’s part and makes your firm standout.
These organizations can track marketing campaign effectiveness, sales wins and losses, and customer service encounters with the customer.
[edit] How to implement CRM
It has been said that CRM is a pervasive strategy that has to be implemented completely throughout an organization. This makes sense since the main concept of CRM is to provide your customers with a valuable and consistent experience throughout your organization.
However, implementing a successful CRM strategy does not mean going out and buying software and mandating that everyone start using it. In fact, this is a recipe for failure.
Start by decomposing your organizations customer interactions logically. Establish milestones, and goals. Then identify business unit for a pilot project. Roll out your CRM in phases, ensuring your milestones are being met for each phase before moving on. And, get your user’s acceptance, you want to help and not hinder their work and more importantly your customer’s opinion of your organization.
