Customer Relationship
Customer relationship management is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. Once simply a label for a category of software tools, today, it generally denotes a company-wide business strategy embracing all client-facing departments and even beyond. When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and technology work in synergy to increase profitability, and reduce operational costs.
Benefits
These tools have been shown to help companies attain these objectives:
- Streamlined sales and marketing processes
- Higher sales productivity
- Added cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
- Improved service, loyalty, and retention
- Increased call center efficiency
- Higher close rates
- Better profiling and targeting
- Reduced expenses
- Increased market share
- Higher overall profitability
- Marginal costing
Challenges
Tools and workflows can be complex to implement, especially for large enterprises. Previously these tools were generally limited to contact management: monitoring and recording interactions and communications. Software solutions then expanded to embrace deal tracking, territories, opportunities, and at the sales pipeline itself. Next came the advent of tools for other client-facing business functions, as described below. These technologies have been, and still are, offered as on-premises software that companies purchase and run on their own IT infrastructure. Perhaps the most notable trend has been the growth of tools delivered via the Web, also known as cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS). In contrast with traditional on-premises software, cloud-computing applications are sold by subscription, accessed via a secure Internet connection, and displayed on a Web browser. Companies don’t incur the initial capital expense of purchasing software; neither must they buy and maintain IT hardware to run it on.
Despite all this, many companies are still not fully leveraging these tools and services to align marketing, sales, and service to best serve the enterprise. Often, implementations are fragmented; isolated initiatives by individual departments to address their own needs. Systems that start disunited usually stay that way: Siloed thinking and decision processes frequently lead to separate and incompatible systems, and dysfunctional processes.
Types/variations
Sales Force Automation
As its name implies, a sales force automation (SFA) system provides an array of capabilities to streamline all phases of the sales process, minimizing the time that reps need to spend on manual data entry and administration. This allows them to successfully pursue more clients in a shorter amount of time than would otherwise be possible. At the heart of SFA is a contact management system for tracking and recording every stage in the sales process for each prospective client, from initial contact to final disposition. Many SFA applications also include insights into opportunities, territories, sales forecasts and workflow automation, quote generation, and product knowledge. Newly-emerged priorities are modules for Web 2.0 e-commerce and pricing.
Marketing
Systems for marketing (also known as marketing automation) help the enterprise identify and target its best clients and generate qualified leads for the sales team. A key marketing capability is tracking and measuring multichannel campaigns, including email, search, social media, and direct mail. Metrics monitored include clicks, responses, leads, deals, and revenue. As marketing departments are increasingly obliged to demonstrate revenue impact, today’s systems typically include features for measuring the ROI of campaigns.
Customer Service and Support
Recognizing that service is an important differentiator, organizations are increasingly turning to technology platforms to help them improve their clients’ experience while increasing efficiency and keeping a lid on costs. Even so, a 2009 study revealed that only 39% of corporate executives believe their employees have the right tools and authority to solve client problems.“. The core for these applications has been and still is comprehensive call center solutions, including such features as intelligent call routing, computer telephone integration (CTI), and escalation capabilities.
Analytics
Relevant analytics capabilities are often interwoven into applications for sales, marketing, and service. These features can be complemented and augmented with links to separate, purpose-built applications for analytics and business intelligence. Sales analytics let companies monitor and understand client actions and preferences, through sales forecasting, data quality, and dashboards that graphically display key performance indicators (KPIs).
Marketing applications generally come with predictive analytics to improve segmentation and targeting, and features for measuring the effectiveness of online, offline, and search marketing campaign Web analytics have evolved significantly from their starting point of merely tracking mouse clicks on Web sites. By evaluating “buy signals,” marketers can see which prospects are most likely to transact and also identify those who are bogged down in a sales process and need assistance. Marketing and finance personnel also use analytics to assess the value of multi-faceted programs as a whole.
These types of analytics are increasing in popularity as companies demand greater visibility into the performance of call centers and other support channels, in order to correct problems before they affect satisfaction levels. Support-focused applications typically include dashboards similar to those for sales, plus capabilities to measure and analyze response times, service quality, agent performance, and the frequency of various issues.
Integrated/Collaborative
Departments within enterprises—especially large enterprises—tend to function in their own little worlds. Traditionally, inter-departmental interaction and collaboration have been infrequent and rivalries not uncommon. More recently, the development and adoption of the tools and services has fostered greater fluidity and cooperation among sales, service, and marketing. This finds expression in the concept of collaborative systems which uses technology to build bridges between departments.
For example, feedback from a technical support center can enlighten marketers about specific services and product features clients are asking for. Reps, in their turn, want to be able to pursue these opportunities without the time-wasting burden of re-entering records and contact data into a separate SFA system. Conversely, lack of integration can have negative consequences: system isn’t adopted and integrated among all departments, several sources might contact the same clients for an identical purpose. Owing to these factors, many of the top-rated and most popular products come as integrated suites.
Small Business
Basic client service can be accomplished by a contact manager system, an integrated solution that lets organizations and individuals efficiently track and record interactions, including emails, documents, jobs, faxes, scheduling, and more. This kind of solution is gaining traction with even very small businesses, thanks to the ease and time savings of handling client contact through a centralized application rather than several different pieces of software, each with its own data collection system. In contrast these tools usually focus on accounts rather than individual contacts. They also generally include opportunity insight for tracking sales pipelines plus added functionality for marketing and service. As with larger enterprises, small businesses are finding value in online solutions, especially for mobile and telecommuting workers.
Social Media
Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are greatly amplifying the voice of people in the marketplace, and are predicted to have profound and far-reaching effects on the ways companies manage their clients. This is because people are using these social media sites to share opinions and experiences on companies, products, and services. As social media isn’t moderated or censored, individuals can say anything they want about a company or brand, whether pro or con.
Increasingly, companies are looking to gain access to these conversations and take part in the dialogue. More than a few systems are now integrating to social networking sites. Social media promoters cite a number of business advantages, such as using online communities as a source of high-quality leads and a vehicle for crowd sourcing solutions to client-support problems. Companies can also leverage client stated habits and preferences to personalize and even “hyper-target” their sales and marketing communications.
Some analysts take the view that business-to-business marketers should proceed cautiously when weaving social media
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