Most people think CRM effectiveness centers around making sure your sales reps are utilizing your CRM system. I think effectiveness is better achieved when combined with Customer Experience Interactions.
If the goal is to cut costs while delivering better service, then it would follow that involving your customers is key to achieving ROI and customer loyalty. If you want to streamline service processes and build relationships, then collaborating with customers can produce more effective returns. The alternative being to take a look at your customers enterprise wide and then provide a composite experience based on what works for a percentage of them.
What I'm talking about is a Customer Portal. If done correctly, a portal can do the following:
- Provide customer-wide information across all customers
- Give customers their own personalized view of content and resources pertinent to them
- Highlight specific information of interest to specific customers and not clutter up other customers' areas.
- Keep them in touch with current projects - showing status, requesting comments and submitting requests for enhancements or service
- Show them their order history with the company
- Mainline them to their sales and service contacts who know them so service is a continuation process instead of a start over and tell me all your information ordeal when they need to interact with your company.
- Allow them to manage their portal users on-demand, eliminating this responsibility from your service departments. But still allowing you to oversee them.
- Create specific discussion forums for one customer or create expertise forums where they can interact with their peers and your experts to build knowledge and engage more fully by getting a view of how others use your products/services.
- Invite customers to participate in company events that deliver relevant value based on which products or services they use now or are considering using in the future.
- Use surveys to determine requirements for new product/service deployements, to assess customer satisfaction and to research the demand for new innovations.
Get the idea? The possibilities are endless.
The ability to provide each customer with their own secure "microsite" as part of the overall portal, but to also show general information that applies to all customers allows you to personalize their view of your company. The options you give them will build relationships by adding collaboration instead of only pushing what you think they are interested in. Knowing what your customers want and delivering that is very powerful. Understanding and addressing individual customer perspectives is the key to building successful interactions.
The kicker is to have certain interactions update the CRM system so you have a system of record for the customer. Webservices make integration easy to accomplish and should go a long way in eliminating huge costs traditionally associated with aligning disparate systems and removing the silo barrier issue that has plagued many companies in the past. Integration also streamlines processes so tasks only need to be done once, but can be reflected where needed.
According to Peppers and Rogers, (heard in a recent webinar with Don Peppers) customer advocacy is the number one driver for customer loyalty.
How much experience does your CRM initiative promote?
