What The Heck Is Customer Relationship Management?

One of the things successful businesses and brands do correctly is having a Customer-Centric business structure. I really love how Superoffice.com described Customer Centricity, they said “Customer Centricity is not just about offering great customer service, it means offering a great experience from the awareness stage, through the purchasing process and finally through the post-purchase process. It’s a strategy that’s based on putting your customer first, and at the core of your business.”

Customer centricity is not just about offering great customer service, it means offering a great experience from the awareness stage, through the purchasing process and finally through the post-purchase process.

Understanding that the way to win for your business is being customer-centric is one thing and being able to manage your customer insights is another thing…Hence the need to understand what Customer Relationship Management ( CRM ) means and what it is all about.

At it’s simplest, CRM is a business approach to understanding and influencing a customer through meaningful communication inorder to increase and improve customer acquisition, customer retention, customer loyalty and profitability.

Where do you put details of your customer? A spreadsheet, a notepad, a CRM system or in your head? Whichever one you make use of, I believe it is important to have a system that stores the details of your customer in a way that you can always get it and use it for actionable insights.

Talking about customer insights, customers insights and behavior can be gotten from their transaction history, the personal data you have of them, data from your website, data gotten from survey and many more. These information about your customer if stored properly in a system can be used to improve the quality of your product offering, can help in product development, can improve the relationship you have with your customers, help in market research and improve sales.

What a good Customer Relationship Management system can do for your business:

1. It helps to spot profitable and unprofitable clients
2. It helps to design and develop new products based on customer preferences
3. It helps to discover opportunities for cross-selling, Up-selling and Bundling
4. It improves the market research strength of your business
5. It helps improve the quality of products and services rendered by your business.

Going further, there are actually 2 types of Customer Relationship Management approach:

• Operational CRM: Is the part of CRM that deals with the actual interaction and conversation with customers inorder to collect data about them. It connects to the customer’s touch point. E.g Interacting via: Social Media, Fax, Email, Website, Call Center and even Physical meetings with the customer.

• Analytic CRM: This is the process whereby businesses coverts data gotten from the operational CRM into actionable insights. It basically helps in developing, supporting and enhancing the decision making of the business by determining patterns and predictions from customer data gotten from the operational CRM.

The key here is to turn your business around by placing the customer at the core of your business and having systems in place to manage the relationship you have with your customers so you can maximize the relationship to the fullest.