CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
UNIT-2
Objectives of CRM
The main objective of CRM process is to originate a powerful new tool for customer retention.
To simplify marketing and sales process
To make call centers more efficient
To provide better customer service
To discover new customers and increase customer revenue
To cross sell products more effectively
CRM PROCESS
To understand the steps in the CRM process, you have to understand the customer life cycle. It is one of
the first concepts that you learn as a sales rep to understand how a person becomes a loyal customer.
The CRM cycle involves marketing, customer service and sales activities. It starts with outreach and
customer acquisition and ideally leads to customer loyalty.
There are five key stages in the CRM cycle:
1. Reaching a potential customer
2. Customer acquisition
3. Conversion
4. Customer retention
5. Customer loyalty
STEPS IN THE CRM PROCESS
The five steps in the CRM process are a collaborative effort between Marketing, Sales and Support
departments. To help you understand how each team works together, we will go through how each step
works in practice. We will cover not only how each part of the process can be completed with a CRM tool
but also who is responsible for each step.
1. Generate brand awareness
The first step in acquiring new customers is to introduce them to your business. The Marketing team
generally takes on this task using a number of measures:
1. Learning about your target audience: Marketers will conduct research to identify their audience’s
target demographics, interests, preferred channels of communication, what messaging they respond
most to and what they care about.
2. Segmenting your target audience: Audience personas are created to segment a brand’s target
audience into similar groups based on similar interests or demographics. This helps marketers identify
which types of people are most likely to become customers and who their campaigns should target.
3. Creating marketing campaigns that speak to the target demographics: A/B tests and marketing
automation can be used to identify what works and what does not, to create unique campaigns for
unique customer segments such as on social media or email and to create strategies for lead
acquisition.
2. Acquire leads
Introducing your brand to a potential customer is just the beginning of the CRM process. From there, you
have to encourage them to learn more about your business and engage with it.
Depending on how your company is structured, this lead acquisition step could be a marketing or sales
team responsibility — or both. Your marketing team, for example, might encourage website visitors to
share their email with a newsletter signup CTA or a social media giveaway. Sales, on the other hand,
could use their CRM system to set up live chat on your site. With this feature, your team can proactively
reach out to potential customers who land on your website.
3. Convert leads into customers
You have successfully engaged with your leads and they are interested. Now it is time to turn those leads
into customers.
To do so, sales reps must first be skilled at identifying how interested leads are and, specifically, whether
they are interested enough to make a purchase. A CRM is very helpful here. The historical data from past
successful sales can be used to identify lead-qualification criteria. These criteria can be added as
“attributes” to your CRM’s lead-scoring tool to help reps identify opportunities with the highest
probability of a sale.
4. Provide superior customer service
You have successfully converted your lead into a customer. Great! But the CRM process does not end
when a customer converts. In order to grow as a company, you need to retain customers. How do you keep
the customer coming back? With excellent service from Support.
5. Drive upsells
When we think of a returning customer, we imagine a shopper continually coming back to the same
business to buy the products they know and love. But there is another key way existing customers provide
value — by upgrading to more expensive products.
How do you convince customers to switch products? Personalised recommendations via email are a great
place to start. You can use your CRM to organize customers into smart lists based on similar purchase
histories.
AN INSIGHT INTO E-CRM
E-CRM/On Line CRM- Online CRM implies an additional means of communication and level of
interaction with the customer where there is a real difference in the technology and its architecture, which
allows for ease and self service to customerSs.
NEED TO ADOPT E-CRM
Optimize the value of inter-active relationships.
Enable business to extend its personalized messaging to the web and E-Mail.
Coordinate Marketing initiatives across all customer channels.
Leverage customer information for more effective e-marketing and e business
Focus Business on improving customer relationships and earning a greater share of each of
customers business through consistent measurement, assessment and “actionable” customer
contact strategies.
BASIC REQUIREMENTS OF E-CRM
Electronic channels-Web Personalized E-Messaging medium for fast interaction
Enterprise-touch and shape a customers experience across the entire organization
Empowerment-Customer Empowerment
Economics-provides the greatest return customer communication initiatives.
Assessment-Evaluation results
Outside information-use of customer sanctioned external information.
STEPS IN BUILDING AN E-CRM SOLUTION
Define business objectives
Assess its current sophistication along the E-CRM continuum in terms of process and technology.
Define Business processes and changes needed to support its goals.
Plan and timetable to implement processes.
Erect the necessary data warehouse to attain a consolidated view of the customers.
Select implement and integrate the required E-CRM applications.
CRM –CYCLE
In CRM Cycle three phases are there-
1. The Assessment Phase
2. Planning Phase
3. Execution Phase
1. The Assessment phase develops a model of the behavior of target customers, using a combination of
in-house data and external demographic, psychographic, and other data. Here, marketing will explore a
number of questions, including:
Who are the customers? What are their demographics and lifestyle?
Where do they live?
What are they worth? What is their lifetime value potential?
What and how do they buy?
What are their purchasing patterns?
Is there a model of their profitability or the risk associated with doing business with them?
How can they be reached? How have they responded to promotions in the past and through which
channels do they prefer to be contacted?
2. During the Planning Phase, marketing decides how best to approach the customers defined in the
assessment stage by designing marketing campaigns and strategies
3. The Execution Phase of the cycle is where an organization puts all this knowledge to work, using
all of the customer touchpoints available.
CRM IN MARKETING
CRM helps in marketing in organized process viz:
Processes that help identify
and target their best
customers, generate quality
sales leads, and plan and
implement marketing
campaigns with clear goals
and objectives.
Processes that help form
individualized relationships
with customers (to improve
customer satisfaction) and
provide the highest level of
customer service to the most
profitable customers.
Processes that provide employees with the information they need to know their customers' wants and
needs, and build relationships between the company and its customers.
CRM – IN RETAIL
The Retail industry has made a change in strategy from being product centric to consumer centric in
the past decade. Also, there is a rapid adoption of Internet technologies.
A major challenge that service providers face is to establish a robust Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) process that accurately collates related customer information for their
organization. The current generation of shoppers is getting savvier in its options.
To compete successfully in the present dynamic environment predictive sales, revenue forecasting,
greater staff productivity, sifting and organizing unstructured data, and automating and streamlining
processes are the key requirements in any CRM solution offering.
