CRM - Mission Critical?!?

The way CRM should be...

Take any company around the world and you would be hard pressed to find one that does not have any customers, At least not one that is “in business” and “making money”. Some companies may have only one or two customers, but that just makes those customers even more valuable. So why did all those Internet startups collapse? Two reasons: First people will use something that is free a lot and use something that costs money a lot less. Changing from free to cost in mid-stream tends to cause a drastic reduction in your customer base. The second reason is customers, or lack of them. The thing is that they are out there.

Companies need to work harder to acquire, service and keep customers on an ongoing basis now than ever before. With the MTV generation and many after it, the attention spans of the customer keep getting shorter, so top of mind is getting harder to achieve and maintain for longer than a nanosecond. This makes Customer Relationship Management (CRM) a mission critical technology for all organizations.

CRM has become a bit of a catchall for a lot of different technologies lately. The basis of CRM is to provide a fully integrated system for all departments that touch or interact directly with the customer, and the departments that deal with the product or service that is going to the customer. This can be achieved through a series of point solutions within each department and some kind of middleware integration layer, or it can be built in layers on a platform or framework application that provides a single front end for CRM and other internal corporate applications.

It’s all about the data. Truly successful companies out there are the ones that know their data, know where it is and how to make it tell them what there customers want, what their customers need, and how well their company is doing at fulfilling those customer needs. The Internet is making this more critical everyday. Another business credo that seems to be lost in the Internet generation is “Be Global and Think Local”. The Internet also makes this easier, but essence of the concept has gotten lost in the translation. The saying needs to be revised to “Think Locally, Globally”.

One thing a lot companies haven’t gotten their heads around on the Internet is that it is the WORLD wide web. Not the US wide web or the Tanzania wide web. Once you make an effort to go on the web, take a moment to think about how you would go about servicing the world since all 6 billion+ people are out there and ready to become your customer. Each one of those customers from anywhere on the globe has there own interpretation of local. Thus you need to bring your organization to grips with various localities of the world.

Nothing is more annoying on the web than finding that perfect tea cozy for a relative’s birthday and then discovering that they do not support shipping orders outside of their home country. Shipping companies are all to ready to deliver anything anywhere, which leaves little excuse for not making the option available. In fact, I have seen more examples of smaller companies harnessing the web as a global order taking presence than larger companies.

High profile examples like England’s Marks and Spencer cannot ship an order outside of the UK according to their website forms. Nor can the Gap take an order online that has to be delivered anywhere outside the United States. Why are these major corporations turning a blind eye to the billions of potential customers that exist outside their borders? People are immigrating and working around the globe more than ever before, but nothing takes you home like being able to order that favorite item from the “local” mainstay of your old home country. Building a web presence that has been specifically hamstrung to tailor to the market of a single country is like printing billions of catalogs to go to every household in the world with a “small print” disclaimer on the back page that indicates you will only deliver within a five minute walk from your Poughkeepsie NY warehouse and everyone else will be cash and carry only.

Once you create your truly world wide web presence, you now have to manage getting the word out to all those customers, maintain contact with that customer, and keep trying to get them to buy something else without pestering them out of their homes. Customer acquisition is only half the battle, keeping the customer is the other half.

This usually means that you need to manage a multimedia approach to getting orders. From online catalogs, to print catalogs, to advertising and fliers that move pervasively from country to culture. You need to accept your orders by phone, fax, Internet, retail, and good old-fashioned mail. Those orders need to funnel into your fulfillment system. Payments need to be processed and accepted in various forms with some forms obtaining instant approval and others that might have delays of several days to clear. Then you need to have the product or service that is being ordered available. Capacity to crate and ship the items with various types of couriers to get the best pricing for you and your customer whether they are across the street, or across the pacific. Incentives and promotional campaigns need to be tracked and presented to existing customers. All of these items focus on allowing the customer to be able to easily acquire a product they desire in the most convenient way for them. Amazingly there are a lot of people that will justify the cost of that convenience or just be happy that they can get a fresh pair of Gap khakis while on that 5-year project in Fiji.

Now the company with the CRM system has a profile of that Fijian customer. They know who he is and where he is, and how he likes to make that purchase and communicate with them. With the proper end-to-end CRM solution in place, they can also determine the amount of time that elapsed for his web purchase to obtain a credit approval. How long it took for that order to get from the web server into their fulfillment system. The time frames required for any ‘out of stock’ or backordered items to refill. Whether or not that backorder held up shipment of other in-stock items or if multiple shipments had to be made. The time it took to go from fulfillment to having the boxes ready for shipping. How long that box sat on the dock before the courier picked it up. Web reporting from the shipper can be integrated to include when the customer actually signed for those pressed khakis.

All the times that the customer phoned to check on their order status is recorded. All calls for customer service, tech support, or returns and exchanges are tracked. That way every representative that may work directly with the customer has a complete history of how the “customer experience” has been going for that individual. They will be better prepared for happy or possibly unhappy interactions with that customer.

Executives will be better equipped to look for areas where efficiencies in a company’s processes can be increased or automated. Outbound sales and marketing efforts can be coordinated better on a regional basis to localized buying habits or requirements. Research can then uncover the reasons for regionalized preferences; improve targeting of products and advertising; help in making smarter purchasing decisions. Even determine what is needed to take product XYZ and turn it into the Product XYZ-Plus or XYZ-Platinum.

The customer can receive various updates on the progress of his order throughout the process of fulfillment to cut down on the “Where the heck is my order” calls to customer service. Customers will also be happier not to get inundated with tons of information and product literature that is not going to interest them in the slightest.

In the online world, even if you have a physical bricks and mortar presence, loyalty is becoming harder to generate. It’s much easier to type in another dot com address and see if the competition is better instead of having to drive 30 miles to find them. It is much easier for bad customer experiences to get communicated through the Internet to friends, family and possibly even posted on a public site for many other potential customers to see.

Customers need to know that they are king. They need to see the results of being on the receiving end of a full scale CRM system to understand that you care who they are. When a single male in his 30s receives a catalog of women’s hair curling products, he realizes that he is just another name on a sheet of mailing labels and that you don’t even realize that Pat is for Patrick and not Patricia.

What makes CRM mission critical? Keeping your customers is mission critical. They are the ones with the money that will make or break your product or service on the open market. Consider CRM to be the crown and you want to let every customer that graces you with an order know that they are wearing that crown.