The customer is always right

Adopting the right CRM strategy can be pivotal in leveraging an advantage over your competitors, as well as of course attracting and retaining customers. We mull over the key issues with two CRM specialists.

“CRM is a long-term commitment with clear objectives and milestones in place and a realisation that this will take a number of years to achieve”
-Luke McKeever, CEO, Portrait Software

BM. These are extremely tough economic conditions, where attracting and retaining customers is of paramount importance. How can good CRM strategies help organisations to achieve these goals?
Luke McKeever. A recent shift in the business priorities has seen growth strategies give way to retention strategies as organisations look to conserve and nurture their existing customer base. Customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy become the key themes. Loyalty is built on trust and dependability so the basics need to be covered; meet and exceed the expectations of your customers by providing consistent service processes across all communication channels. Responsiveness along with operational transparency will engender trust and loyalty within your customer base.

Knowing when, where and what to communicate becomes the differentiating factor. Today, the beating heart of any customer centric strategy is intelligence; the more you know the better you can serve, retain and extend that customer relationship. Great customer advocates then become a key tenant of your CRM strategy. The right of passage is to serve well through consistent process, use these interactions to learn and build intelligence, use this intelligence to drive engaging automated customer communications, ensuring every customer interaction counts.

Tieren Zhou. A good CRM strategy is essential in today's climate, together with a CRM package that connects all the parts of your business. For a CRM strategy to work it will need to determine some fundamental elements such as who are your customers, how do they interact with you and how do you get value out of the relationship with them. The strategy will also need to cover your business processes, workflows and knowledge repositories to ensure maximum collaboration within your organisation, which in turn will lead to increased sales, higher customer satisfaction and higher productivity. Delivering superior customer service throughout the entire customer lifecycle is critical to maintain beneficial customer relationships.

BM. What are the common mistakes that organisations make with their CRM efforts?
TZ. Organisations tend to focus on implementing formal processes and standardising business rules and in the process forgetting to include informal workflows, individual knowledge and buy-in from the users. A large portion of CRM installations fail on poorly designed processes and interfaces, it's imperative that CRM systems are easily customised and configurable to ensure maximum user adoption and usage. The CRM system also must be able to handle knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, and encourage users to increase the CRM knowledge base in order to enhance cross-team communication and efficiency while increasing sales and customer satisfaction. 

LM. Historically we have seen organisations approach CRM as a technology solution. However the enlightened see CRM requires a mindset change within an organisation. Customer centricity or branded customer service is a responsibility that pervades an organisation and becomes the responsibility of everyone. This has to be top down, where there is clear corporate alignment with a customer centric approach to the market place and an executive stakeholder in place. CRM is a long-term commitment with clear objectives and milestones in place and a realisation that this will take a number of years to achieve. Many organisations fail to put in place the basic processes that will ensure customers are well served and data is gathered and used to improve engagement over time.

A customer relationship has a lifecycle and will change and evolve based on personal, social and economic criteria, hence continuing to listen and solicit customer feedback is fundamental to retaining and growing your customers.

Failure to put in place measurement. How can you measure your level of success and plan forwards without clear objective metrics - where are you today and where do you want to be in the future?

BM. Can you give examples of how your products and services have been beneficial for your customers recently?
LM. Now, more than ever, time to value or short-term ROI matters. With over 20 years' experience in delivering customer centric solutions Portrait Software's solutions are engineered to deliver fast returns for our customers. Examples include:

Nationwide Building Society - Portrait Inbound Marketing now delivers more sales than all other direct marketing combined.

Lloyds TSB Insurance - Portrait Uplift Analytics for renewal management increased customer retention by over 300 percent.

Visit Scotland - Portrait Campaign Management & Analytics for relationship marketing boosts Scottish tourism revenue.

Merrill Lynch - Portrait Inbound Marketing drives more relevant customer dialog increasing product up take and improving retention by over 20 percent.

US Bank - Portrait Uplift Analytics increased response rates by over 300 percent while reducing costs by 40 percent.

TZ. The golden thread within TechExcel's products and services is a knowledge-centric approach and thus bringing the customers business areas together with a suite of web-based products to enhance both productivity and increase customer satisfaction. We are continuously developing our product suites to make sure our customers have the best possible tools at their disposal, and we are always on the forefront in using new innovative concepts and technologies to deliver superior benefits to our customer base. TechExcel's strength is not only our award winning products, it is also to work with our customers to deliver holistic solutions, including certified training courses from the Service Desk Institute, to maximise our customers return on investment.

BM. Looking ahead, how do you see the CRM market evolving in the next few years?
TZ. There is still a figure growth in the western CRM market, however the biggest growth in the next five years will be in China and India as well as emerging markets in Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa. Within the CRM market the biggest growth factor is the move towards Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) together with total web delivery. I believe with the business networking and Web 2.0 applied to enterprise wave currently going, the CRM solution is and will be changing its core functions from vendors pushing messages to customers to vendors just participating in a customer- and knowledge-centric community and market space online the Web 2.0 way. That means CRM solutions need to change its marketing model to message marketing success by monitoring the metrics related to business community portal. CRM solutions will be either including enterprise community platform or integrate with existing enterprise community platform. Enterprise community portal will be a central part of a business, and of course an important part of CRM success. TechExcel is well ahead in the area and will shortly be releasing innovating knowledge-centric applications for this market segment.

LM. Channel diversity along with greater customer expectations will shape CRM over the next few years. The mobile generation will not be limited by a PC browser but will want to interact when and where is most convenient - for them. Customer service processes will need to be built in such a way that they can easily be adapted as both market and customer preferences change. Powerful analytics will keep the providers one step ahead of customers, pre-empting interactions and delivering relevance and value. From that point of view marketing becomes 'always-on', wherever the customer chooses to interact and marketing must optimise that opportunity to do the right thing.

As customers rebel against poorly targeted campaigns, marketers will require more sophisticated tools to automate and more precisely target their offers. Tracking and predicting customer behaviour while monitoring trends and patterns across increasingly influential social media sites will direct marketers' campaigns. A greater use of advanced behavioural analytics along with workflow based on marketing best practise to improve marketing efficiency will guide marketers to deliver the best next actions for their customers.

The experts:
Luke McKeever is CEO for Portrait Software.
Tieren Zhou is the founder, CEO and Chief Software Architect at TechExcel.