Home Ondernemen & Business You are in great danger…if you think managing customer relations is just...

You are in great danger…if you think managing customer relations is just about a tool

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I’m still surprised to regularly meet decision makers that confuse the implementation of a CRM tool with a customer strategy. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of CRM tools. And organizations do need help to cherish their clients. But a customer strategy does not end with CRM. Nor does it start with it, for that matter. You need to think beyond that.

You need an end to end vision that begins with attacking the smallest building blocks, your data. Are they clean? Are all your different databases neatly connected- ranging from those containing whitepaper downloads lead information, to point of sales or customer loyalty cards? If they are not, you will never be able to use your CRM to its fullest potential.

Next crucial question to ask yourself: does your CRM lead to enough satisfying reporting capabilities? And are the results of the upfront customer analytics available for the right employees? And even more important: are you feeding the analytics solutions with the useful, correct and valuable input? When doing so, don’t limit yourself to internal sources only. Though valuable information will come of them, you should broaden and enrich your view to what’s outside your company walls by retrieving data from all possible external data. Those need to come amongst others from Twitter, Facebook, industrial sensors, weather reports, geo-tracking data, website logs, etc. I love the example of the online retailer that integrated weather data in their systems and automatically praised their snow boots promotions a few day before the first snow was to be expected.

Last but not least, when you do use all of the rich potential that is at hand and come to valuable predictions, do not forget to make sure that all your reactions to them are properly managed (and if appropriate: automated). What is the use of knowing that a customer clicked on your Facebook page link towards the promotion of your new insurance package and that he downloaded your folder, if you do not act upon it or don’t act quickly enough? You need smart dashboards to notify your sales about this and tell them that the customer in casu might be convinced by nothing more than a simple call from your site.

Great customer relations and experiences need more than just a smart tool. They result from an end to end strategy. A full-on circle from dry data to a set of actions through interconnected channels, feeding each other. Maybe you have thought of a mobile channel like a connected tablet allowing your sales to give real time advice on online and offline stocks or promotions in store. That is obviously great. But is it integrated intelligently with your tool for marketing automation? The next time a promotion goes out for the brand-new novel of Paul Auster (as the customer in question had been asking about him), you will be able to notify him about that if only all your channels and (marketing-, sales- and service-) activities are properly interconnected. Think about it. When it comes to channels, you need to think end-to-end, across all of them and in an interlinked manner. That way you can recognize customers that hop between the different channels and help them properly. This is the only way that you will be able to give your customers the service they are prepared to pay for and thus stay with you.

However, all this is still not sufficient enough to have the best customer strategy. The best strategies only work when they are built upon a dynamic ecosystem that keeps evaluating and renewing itself. An ecosystem going far beyond the slowly built, heavy and expensive CRM-tools and -projects such as we’ve all seen them the last decades. I’m sure you remember them… It was never the CRM itself that was the problem behind the low- or non-performance. There are other reasons for the failures, such as the fact that the requirements of the clients were misunderstood because of a lack of dialogue. Or that the development was almost never aligned with the client in the building phase. Or that projects took so long to be finished that the company, the market and the customers had changed so much in a way that the CRM solution in question was no longer relevant. In these fast moving times, such an approach is not an option anymore (if it ever was). When it comes to analyzing, implementing and adapting your customer solutions architecture, make sure that you work in small agile steps. Work closely with your solution provider and/or consultancy partner in short loops. Meet regularly. Measure repeatedly. Have things adapted when necessary. It is all about small and quick steps that can easily be re-directed whenever needed.

We’re living fast times. Make sure your architecture and your strategy are up for that. Because the days customer relations were all about one single powerful tool are long gone.

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