What is one of the most important things for a company to have? Customers, right, and how do you keep those customer? By making sure you are developing the customer relationship. I am going to tell you a few ways you can do this, its not hard, in fact its quite the easy process, but its also one that never ends. You need to always be looking for ways to improve and enhance the customer relationship if you want your business to continue to be successful.
Internet companies, need to take a transactional approach to developing this relationship, since they don't have direct contact with the customer. I think it is a little bit harder to develop a relationship with someone you couldn't pick out on the street, but it's still possible to do and be successful at it.
First, let me begin by telling you what customer relationship management or CRM is all about. CRM is the practices, strategies, and technology that companies use to build up their customer relationships with consumers and also retain that customer base. The process is a continuous one; it never ends, with every new customer the process starts over again.
Customer
relationship management is made up of three different elements. They are, strategic,
operational and analytical, with different requirements. You need to build each
step to get each element correct.
To get the
strategic part started you need to identify who your customer is. Social media can
play a big role in this step of the process, by doing research of who your
customer base is and gathering individual or household name, plus addresses. Once
you have this information you can then divide them into different groups based
on their needs, actual value, and their potential value. Interactions with the
customer are the key to this step and you can accomplish this by seeing and
understanding what the needs of the customer are. You will also need to make sure you are keeping track of the
data for each person and household, and make sure the data is up to date and
current. Once you do that you can
customize how you deal with the customer; for example, giving specialized
offers that are only good for valued customers, but since you value all your
customers, this research will help you determine the ones who are more loyal to
you.
The next steps in
the process are the operational and analytical ones. This is why the research done in the first
step of the process is so important because you need to make sure that you have
a good customer database to focus on. If you don’t have an up to date database,
you could be wasting your time by sending information to someone not
interested, yet on the other hand, an accidental message may gain you a new
customer to add to your database.
The customer
database is used to divide and analyze customer profiles to help with sending
the right emails and newsletters, to right customers; you don’t want to send an
email about air conditioners to someone who lives in Alaska, or a loyalty
coupon for space heaters to someone living in Arizona. It also helps with marketing display
advertising, and can help to predict what future marketing programs should be. This
step uses response marketing to help determine all these things.
The analytical
element is where you take the information you have gathered in the customer
database and use that to develop programs or predictive models to use in your
marketing strategy. This is another reason why you need to keep the customer
database current.
As anyone who has
been in business can tell you, you are never done with customer relationship
management. It is an ongoing process
since you are always going to get new customers and with each one you need to doing
research on them and putting the information into the database that is constantly
updating. You will also need to do this to maintain the customer base that you
already have. This may seem like a lot
of work, but by using the information you collect will help to ensure you are
using the right marketing tools. Each new person or household adds another
dimension to the process. It’s like a merry go round, it just keeps going round
and round, as long as you’re in business, you will be dealing with the CRM
process.
I work for a
credit union and we have a process in place to build our customer relationships
and retain them. This process is called the 2-2-2 process. When we open a new
account for a new member, we send them a Thank you card by the second day of
opening the account. We then give the member a call two weeks after open the
account, to make sure things are going well and if they have any concerns or
issues that I can help with. We then
follow up with a call two months after the opening of the account, once again
checking to see if they are enjoying the benefits of our checking products.
Many of the new members I have opened accounts for have been very impressed
with this process. We also call on our new members that come to us from an
indirect lending program. I call them, Welcome them to the credit union, give
them the closest location to their home and also give them a direct number to
me and my branch should they have any questions. When I do any of these processes I input
notes into their account so it’s kept in a database to use as a follow up and
marketing tool. I have had great success in gaining and maintaining new members
with these procedures.
CRM is a very real
and vital aspect to any company; you can’t get very far without following the
steps.
5 Key Ways to Build Customer Relationships. (2005, April
30). Retrieved September 20, 2015
.
What is customer relationship management (CRM) ? - Definition
from WhatIs.com. (n.d.). Retrieved September 20, 2015.
Quinton, S. (2013). The digital era requires new knowledge
to develop relevant CRM strategy: a cry for adopting social media research
methods to elicit this new knowledge. Journal Of Strategic Marketing, 21(5),
402-412. doi:10.1080/0965254X.2013.801611
