CRM and Customer Focused Business Strategy

The first business requirement is to develop a cohesive customer focused business strategy. The business management software for CRM that you select should provide technology support to implement that strategy.

A customer-focused strategy identifies the value that you want to provide your customers. It then spells out the broad outlines for providing this value. This involves projecting a consistent picture of your business through all customer interfaces - face-to-face communications, phone and email contacts, your website and what the customer gets from your customer service & support section, for example.

If each of these interfaces project a different face of your business, the customer is quite likely to get confused and irritated.

Let us now look at the specifics of business management software for CRM.

Customer Relationship Management Functions

• Lead Management: Leads are generated through trade fairs, print ads, direct mail, your website, market contacts and several other sources. The leads are typically assessed for quality and then entrusted to selected salespersons to follow up. Data generated during the lead management process is accumulated for analysis.
• Customer Acquisition: Leads are converted into customers by following them up through different stages of sales readiness. CRM would monitor the follow up actions and identify the best prospects. Here again, data would be recorded so that successes and failures can be analyzed and suitable strategies developed.
• Customer Retention: Retaining each customer you acquire is a major goal. Servicing an existing customer is less expensive than acquiring a new customer and hence the key importance of this aspect. The customer must find your dealings with the person highly satisfying. Deliveries, billing, payment options, response to requests and complaints, after sales support all must go to keep the customer with you.
• Additional Business: Tracking customer preferences, purchases history and behavior patterns can reveal opportunities for selling additional products to that person. CRM would track all these factors and generate profiles and reports.

Technology Support Provided by CRM Software

The business management software for CRM that you buy should have facilities to attend to all the functions we identified above. The role of the software is to provide technology support so that you can perform the functions effectively using appropriate technology. In particular, the software should enable:

• Capturing or importing leads from various sources
• Assessing the quality of leads based on applicable factors
• Defining rules for assigning leads to sales force, and implementing them
• Tracking prospects through different stages to final customer orders
• Managing accounts - quotes, sales, billing, payment, purchase history, additional sales opportunities
• Facilitating customer communications and responses - emails, requests, complaints - and storing them for easy retrieval when needed
• Data analysis to generate actionable reports

Business software for CRM would also typically help you generate more business through facilitating sales forecasts and sales quotas. These reports would use the insights you have gained through analysis of the accumulated data.

CRM and General Management

CRM focuses on customer relations. However, the customer experience, and hence the effectiveness of customer relations, is typically affected by how you manage other functions. For example, vendor management, HR policies, training & development methodologies and internal processes of your organization can have a significant impact on the kind of experience that customers get.

Needless to say that you have to align everything into a consistent whole so that your organization projects the desired image to your customers. Merely installing business management software for CRM would not help you do this.