Introduction
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are software packages that help a business focus on its customers by way of understanding their requirements, serving them appropriately and providing additional services that will lead to customer delight. CRM software packages are widely used around the world and they have started providing superior business value. The key business value, organizations are deriving out of a CRM system is providing a great customer experience at all touch points. This article will focus on customer experience as a main value that any company can get because of implementing an efficient CRM system.
This article will propose a model for achieving a good customer experience using the traditional CRM systems available in the market.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer Experience can be defined as the impression that is left on the minds of the customer because of their interaction with an organization’s employee, brand, website, customer applications, office space, Point of Sale (PoS) or any other touch point. Great customer experiences are built around feelings, emotions, spaces and thousands of other factors.
Providing a superior customer experience should be the ultimate goal of any CRM system.
How to build a great Customer Experience?
The basic foundation to build a great customer experience has three parts to it:
• Extract
• Engage
• Entice
We can call this the 3 E’s of creating a great customer experience using CRM systems. I call this the “3E Model for Better Customer Experience”.
Extract – There is a saying “Your CRM is only as good as your data”. The “Extract” part of the equation tells us that maintaining important customer information is the first step towards providing world class customer experience.
Engage – Engaging customers with personalized services will be a result of a deep understanding of the customer’s profile.
Entice – Customers will be naturally attracted when they are approached with the right offer at the right time at the right place.
We will try to look into these three aspects of customer experience in more detail.
Extract
CRM systems help in extracting the all the relevant information from the customer. The following points will help extracting the right information from the customer using CRM systems:
• CRM systems should capture the basic or core customer information like
o Account details
o Contact details
• Account details vary from basic profile information to industry focus, credit profile and service history
• Contact details vary from basic contact profile to contact preferences and contact’s influence in decision making
• The secret to achieving great customer experience is trying to collect all possible information about the customer even when some information is considered to be trivial like customer’s preference to stay only on the ground floor of hotel, preference towards a specific car brand during rentals etc.
• Today’s CRM systems like Siebel, Salesforce.com, Amdocs and other systems comes with built in Business Intelligence (BI) systems which can leverage even trivial information to build patterns and create knowledge out of the information
Engage
Engaging a customer with valuable product information and promotions will reap benefits in the short and long run. Some practices towards this effort are as follows:
• Businesses can leverage the service request calls from customers to present information about new offers and promotions
• The first step in building great customer experience “Extract” would have resulted in huge amount of information and this information will be crunched by the BI systems to arrive at personalized offers for each customer
• CRM systems should present this information to a service rep or sales rep at the right moment to engage a customer during service calls or other customer meetings
• Customer Engagement in the right and focused way can lead to exponential sales growth
• Customer Engagement should lead to the involvement of the customer and evolve into to a conversation rather than being a monologue from the service rep or sales rep
• Engagement leads to a greater level of interest from both parties, sales/service rep and the customer
• Service / Sales rep might not have known the specific insight into the customer or product and hence gets clear picture on how close a sale
• The customer will be interested in the new offer or personalized feel of the offering which otherwise he would have not known
Entice
Entice is the step after engaging a customer with a personalized offer. A few pointers in this final step are as follows:
• Customers get attracted to new offers when they are approached at the right time and right place
• Customers should feel that the offer presented to them will be of value and required at this point of time
• Customers will naturally feel delighted when the offer purchased brings them value
So ultimately this model of Extract, Engage and Entice in the customer experience paradigm will help enterprises achieve greater business value. Focusing on each step at a time will help organizations fully channelize their resources and achieve the maximum benefit out of their CRM systems.
