Managing customers

Companies that will succeed in the future will be ones that keep track of their customers and better understand their needs. This will he...

Companies that will succeed in the future will be ones that keep track of their customers and better understand their needs. This will help them produce repeat business. This business requirement has led to a business area now being referred to as Customer Relationship Management CRM, which ultimately deals with managing all instances of contact with the customer in order to build a long-lasting relationship with the customer. The elements of the CRM chain are sales process, order fulfillment process and customer services.

For organisations that strive to beat competition, simply automating existing processes is not enough. CRM is about building a relationship with customers, nurturing and maintaining it in order to leverage it for better customer retention. More companies are embracing CRM because today8217;s business is not about giving a better product or a better service in isolation. It is about building a deeper relationship with your customer.

CRM describes a fundamental business strategy to deliverservices and products consistently across an entire customer relationship rather than just within a particular product or business unit. The role technology serves in CRM is providing both informational systems for relationship knowledge and operational systems to support the means to service those relationships. Business is about consumer choices and not about supply and distribution anymore. Sales and service channels are needed, but they take the consumer a few steps away. Modern communication restrains long-term brand loyalty.8217; Businesses need to build direct relationships with their 8220;consumers8221; moving from market-share to customer-share. In a crowded and highly competitive market, where customers can and do switch between competing suppliers, achieving high market share can be costly and self-defeating. So today8217;s CRM experts advise focusing on increasing customer share. By this they mean trying to sell customers as many high margin products as possible on a one-to-one basis over the course of alifetime.

By using CRM, organisations gain better insight into their clients8217; buying behaviour, turning data into information and using it as the basis for decisions and new initiatives in customer focused marketing. The power of CRM lies in an ever-increasing understanding of the customer base and in the use of this understanding. Adopting a CRM strategy is a never-ending road of continuous learning, and of continuous performance improvement. Customers truly sustain any business and their value does not lie in a single sale, it lies in the lifetime relationship they have with your company. Sales are a by-product of that relationship. In other words, customers are one of the few sustainable8217; competitive advantages open to the company. Being customer-focused is much tougher than being product-focussed. So customer relationships require a lot more management than products ever did.An integrated solution that manages information about your customers would help you in leveraging this asset your customerrelationships to the highest degree. 8220;Smiles8221; from Global Groupware Solutions is one such solution which takes care of customer service and sales force automation requirements. The CRM process integrates sales and service because these are two areas of direct contact with the customer.The driver for success of any CRM solution lies in integrating the links between all of those people who have a contact with the customer 8212; sales, marketing call, call centers, support services, and so on.

The author is CEO, Global Groupware Solutions