Make your Customers Sticky through world-class CRM!
Tips always sound easy, like someone whispering the name of a good horse to back in the Grand National. We’re bringing you not one tip but ten tips, but after that you still have to run the race! Based on research carried out by Prof Hugh Wilson at Cranfield School of Management and other academic colleagues, including Prof. Moira Clark at Henley, the researchers uncovered the following top 10 dimensions to world class CRM in a multi-channel world.
Top 5 – Know your Customer:
- Data integration: you need a single 360 Degree view of the customer across all your touchpoints, products and business functions.
- Process integration: make sure the way you respond to customers shows joined up thinking from the customer’s perspective.
- Communications integration: To make sure inbound and outbound communications are co-ordinated put one person in charge. Remember you make your profit from Customer Lifetime Value so align your business to ensure that you really are creating value rather than hurdles.
- Structure for integration: Make sure your organisational structure is designed around the customer, not your needs.
- Metrics integration: while this can be challenging, as inbound and outbound communications have different metrics, not to mind digital marketing and traditional marketing, at least seek to create a single dashboard of metrics that your tracking in one place so that the focus is on assisting the customer rather than meeting narrow departmental or sales objectives at the cost of customer needs.
Top 5 – Create Better Customer Interactions:
- Individualisation: treat each customer in a way that is appropriate to everything you know about them and their priorities.
- Customer centricity: For long-term relationships, make sure you take the long term view of every offer made to the customer.
- Dynamic interaction: ensure front line people are empowered to respond appropriately and speedily to customer needs.
- Customer selectivity: customer service must be embedded in customer value. You cannot give Rolls-Royce service to a customer who is losing you money. Ideally seek right clients, right terms. Many customers are happy to use lower cost channels as long as the experience is great.
- Peer-to-Peer Conversations: enable customers to talk to each other by hosting forums or crowdsourcing ideas.
For more ideas on how to build customer advocacy and retention, contact Cariona Neary.
