CRM Overview
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“A holistic approach that empowers your customers to manage their relationship with your business”
CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management and has been a buzz phrase in marketing circles for many years now.
CRM is arguably one of the most confused business practices, perhaps because it encapsulates so many disciplines, the most obvious being Information Technology. For whatever reason, most people associate CRM with a software application like Siebel, SAP, Oracle, etc. The truth is that these applications are moulded around principles of CRM but do not, in and of themselves, give businesses the reach they need to truly be customer centric.
We like to talk about CRM as being the process of service delivery through which businesses deliver value creating products and services to their clients. The key here is the word “process”. This explicitly forces you to look at your business holistically and then gear the entire organisation to become customer centric[1]. Thus CRM is not IT’s responsibility because they “own” the software or marketing’s job because they get to do everything nobody else wants to deal with. The entire organisation assumes the responsibility of delivering value to its customers.
Another important fundamental in understanding CRM is perspective. By this we mean looking at it from the customer’s point of view and balancing their needs and requirements with your businesses needs and objectives. In essence, the customer is only king if this is in the businesses best interests! Not traditional thinking, but important to understand. CRM is not about outlandish promises; it’s more concerned with managing perceptions. Understand what people are expecting, deliver it if you can, otherwise offer a value creating compromise.
A refined CRM strategy will, in no uncertain terms, add value to your bottom line. Customer centric organisations are resource efficient; value creating machines whose common product is satisfied and loyal customers. The paradox is that CRM is not done to make more money. It works the other way round!
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[1] Customer centricity refers to the orientation of a company to the needs and behaviors of its customers, rather than internal drivers (such as the quest for short term profit).