Performance Driven CRM: How to Make Your Customer Relationship Management Vision a Reality
Excerpted with permission from "Performance Driven CRM: How to Make Your Customer Relationship Management Vision a Reality," by Stanley A. Brown and Moosha Gulycz, Copyright 2002. Published by John Wiley & Sons, April 2002. ISBN 978-0-470-83161-8. For more information about this book and to purchase, visit www.wiley.com.
Getting Started: The Need for a CRM Vision to Drive the Process
While CRM is a business strategy that seeks to
optimize profitability, revenue and customer access, performance-driven
CRM is more. It is an ongoing mechanism, based on continuous
improvement, that allows organizations to sustain lasting relationships
and gives them the ability to understand, anticipate, manage and personalize
the experience with their current and potential customers and
employees.
It starts with a clear understanding of:
Customers and their needs
The organization and its competencies
The organization's commitment to quality service -- from both an
internal and external customer perspective
It requires measures/standards and benchmarks and a mechanism
to create change -- change in process, actions, organizational structure
and people competencies. CRM can survive only with continuous performance
improvement.
There is no doubt that in today's business environment, it is
becoming increasingly difficult to manage customer relationships profitably:
Increasingly informed customers have more choice and are less
loyal to their suppliers.
New distribution channels and communication media mean that
the customer interaction mix is more complex, difficult to integrate
and potentially expensive.
Delivery channels are increasingly complex.
Numerous powerful technology enablers are now available but are
expensive to implement, and historic returns are uncertain at best.
Marketplaces and exchanges threaten to bring manufacturers closer
to their customers -- disintermediation.
There is therefore a compelling need for a CRM vision that addresses
many of the issues with which organizations typically struggle:
Which customers should you target?
How can you deal with rapidly increasing channel fragmentation
and media complexity to communicate with your customers?
How should you balance quality of experience, cost to serve and
profitability of the customer?
What is the appropriate level of CRM integration for your business?
What is customer "insight," and how do you get and use it?
What should you do with unprofitable customers?
Download the full chapter for more on defining and creating a CRM vision, including a case study of DuPont, in Chapter 1: Getting Started: The Need for a CRM Vision to Drive the Process
Read other excerpts and download more sample chapters from our CRM and call center bookshelf
To purchase this book, visit www.wiley.com
