Is your business capable of being head and shoulders above the rest?
Customer Relationship Management is based on developing profitable, win-win relationships with prospective and existing customers. It’s about nurturing that business relationship so the customer is retained and continually provided with value from your business’s products.
CRM is the framework on which strong customer relationships are built. Personalization is key, but impossible to maintain on a large scale without a system. With CRM, you can keep track of past communications, scheduled commitments, contact names, birthdays, best method of contact, and other details that communicate a sense of community with the people who choose to do business with us.
Today’s customers want more than a generic product or service. They are looking for an experience. If you can make doing business with you a customized, personal experience, worthy of water cooler conversation, you have a customer for life.
CRM also allows for excellent customer service, time and time again. When a customer calls in with a concern, you have a way to note the concern as well as the steps taken to alleviate the problem. Even if the customer calls in repeatedly, anyone who takes the call can become apprised of the situation by checking the notes in the CRM system. You can also track recurring concerns and be proactive in preventing future issues.
The popular author of Permission Marketing and Purple Cow, Seth Godin, encourages a work environment where employees do not have to ask permission but rather can take the initiative to solve problems in their company. With a comprehensive CRM tool, all staff members have the resources and knowledge base to make wise decisions and come up with valuable business solutions. The result is a more effective and efficient sales staff.
To be a leader in today’s business world means more than being lean and mean. It’s about communicating knowledge, experience, and resources to potential customers who are seeking a solution.
A comprehensive CRM tool that both records and disseminates information quickly, allowing you to build relationships with your customers, will put your company head and shoulders above the rest.
I think all businesses have the potential of being head and shoulders above the rest if they actively engage their customers in a personal way to create positive experiences each and every time they do business.
CRM is a technology tool that helps businesses manage customer relationships in an organized way, such as generating sales leads, identifying purchasing patterns for a new product launch or developing a customer satisfaction survey. But these uses are simply a first step in helping companies stay more connected with their customers. To realize the full potential of CRM, businesses must use these tools and their data as a part of a more comprehensive customer engagement strategy.
Exemplary customer engagement comes down to knowing what kind of information your customer wants, as well as when and how they want to receive it. Using communication technology such as voice mail, e-mail and SMS texting, businesses can create a dialogue with customers that not only makes a connection, but inspires them to take action.
That’s when Engagement Communications comes in to its own. Engagement Communications applies high technology communications in a way that creates a personal, human touch. It’s based on ongoing, two-way dialogue, rather than a one-directional “touch.” The dialogue with customers not only fulfills the promise of building better customer relationships, but also creates a constant feedback loop that gives businesses deeper insights into their customers’ motivations and needs.
For example, hotels and resorts are integrating their reservation systems with automated customer engagement communications. By providing customers, at point of check-in, the opportunity to receive SMS, voice or email messages to be notified about anything from happy hour discount notifications, show tickets or restaurant reservations, casinos are able to tailor the information and medium used to engage their customers.
TeleVox recently implemented an Engagement Communications pilot program for a Las Vegas casino/hotel where 5,000 patrons were notified of a special offer to receive a free room and concert ticket. Patrons could choose to be transferred to a call center to take advantage of the offer. The calls were significantly cheaper than a direct mail campaign and offered immediate and measurable results.
Specifically, and building on this example, our experience shows that for every $1 businesses spend on our customer engagement technology, they receive a $20 return. This means a typical month’s worth of calls can engender more than $500K in additional revenue to the casino. This recent pilot proved the impact of one night’s calls, resulting in our client seeing 20% more Friday night traffic than any other night in recent memory and 25% higher day traffic than any day over the last.
This level of customer engagement redefines the customer experience and generates the level of brand loyalty that will lift your business over the heads and shoulders of the rest.
Thank you for the post.
Scott Zimmerman
TeleVox
Thank you for your comments Scott. You bring up some good points for customer engagement and success measurements.
I have found that when a business only thinks of CRM as technology they are losing out on 90% of what a CRM business system and processes can do for the acquiring, development and retaining of business relationships with its customers. Let us also not forget the internal customer- the internal staff that are the front line in the experience provided to prospects and customers.
A CRM customer-centric strategy will certainly merge with the technology found from the CRM management tools, the CRM SQL relational database, and then expose the data for end users and management in dashboards so they can make intelligent business decisions faster and easier. Technology components of CRM certainly are a great enabler of the CRM strategy. I look forward to the rise of social media integrations within CRM for an even richer engagement experience.
Many, many years ago I heard a well known CRM guru state that CRM is 60% about the people, 30% about the processes and 10% about the technology. Keeping that perspective and state of mind will help a business gain Success with CRM.