McGraw-Hill - Briefcase Books - Customer Relationship Management.pdf - Mcgraw-Hill [Briefcase Books] - motywacja007

Customer Relationship

Management Is Not

an Option

customers.” Implied in his words and his work is the impor-

tance of keeping those same customers and of growing the

depth of their relationship with you. After all, as research by

Frederick Reichhold and Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business

School shows, most customers are only profitable in the second

year that they do business with you. That’s right. Initially, new

customers cost you money—money spent on advertising and

marketing and money spent learning what they want and teach-

ing them how best to do business with you.

Customer relationship management (CRM) can be the single

strongest weapon you have as a manager to ensure that cus-

tomers become and remain loyal. That’s right! CRM is the single

strongest weapon you have, even before your people. Sound

like heresy? Let us explain what we mean.

Great employees are, and always will be, the backbone of

any business. But employee performance can be enhanced or

hampered by the strategy you set and by the tools that you give

P eter Drucker said, “The purpose of a business is to create

Customer Relationship Management

employees to get the job done. Done right, CRM is both a strat-

egy and a tool, a weapon, if you will. In your hands, and in the

hands of your employees, CRM comes to life, keeping you and

your team on course and able to anticipate the changing land-

scape of the marketplace. With CRM, loyal customers aren’t a

happy accident created when an exceptional customer service

representative, salesperson or product developer intuits and

responds to a customer need. Instead, you have at your finger-

tips the ultimate advantage—customer intelligence: data turned

into information and information turned into acustomer-satisfy-

ing action.

Implementing CRM is a nonnegotiable in today’s business

environment. Whether your customers are internal or external,

consumers or businesses, whether they connect with you elec-

tronically or face to face, from across the globe or across town,

CRM is your ticket to success.

Customer Relationship Management Defined

Customer Relationship Management is a comprehensive

approach for creating, maintaining and expanding customer

relationships. Let’s take a closer look at what this definition

implies.

First, consider the word “comprehensive.” CRM does not

belong just to sales and marketing. It is not the sole responsibili-

ty of the customer service

group. Nor is it the brain-

child of the information

technology team. While

any one of these areas

may be the internal cham-

pion for CRM in your organization, in point of fact, CRM must be

a way of doing business that touches all areas. When CRM is

delegated to one area of an organization, such as IT, customer

relationships will suffer. Likewise, when an area is left out of

CRM planning, the organization puts at risk the very customer

relationships it seeks to maintain.

CRM A comprehensive

approach for creating,

maintaining and expanding

customer relationships.

Customer Relationship Management Is Not an Option

Patients Are Customers, Too

In the early 1990s Midwest Community Hospital (not its

real name) recognized that managed care plans dictated

where patients went for their first hospitalization. However, it was the

quality of caring during their patient experience that determined

whether or not individuals and families would choose MCH for their

next healthcare need or move heaven and earth to have their man-

aged care plan send them somewhere else. So, a “Guest Relations”

program was launched to increase patient satisfaction and loyalty. It

involved all patient contact areas, from the security personnel who

patrolled the parking ramp, to the nurses and aides, to the facilities

management team, to the kitchen and cafeteria staff. It forgot finance.

Accounting staff, accustomed to dealing with impersonal policies and

government-regulated DRG (diagnostic related groups) payment

guidelines, took a clinical and impersonal approach to billing and col-

lections. MCH found that all the good will created during the patient

stay could be, and often was, undone when a patient or family member

had an encounter with the finance group. MCH learned the hard way

that managing the customer relationships extends beyond traditional

caregivers, and that to work CRM must involve all areas.

The second key word in our definition is “approach.” An

approach, according to Webster, is “a way of treating or dealing

with something.” CRM is a way of thinking about and dealing

with customer relationships. We might also use the word strategy

here because, done well, CRM involves a clear plan. In fact, we

believe that your CRM strategy can actually serve as a bench-

mark for every other strategy in your organization. Any organiza-

tional strategy that doesn’t serve to create, maintain, or expand

relationships with your target customers doesn’t serve the organ-

ization.

Strategy sets the direction for your organization. And any

strategy that gets in the way of customer relationships is going

to send the organization in a wrong direction.

You can also consider this from a department or area level.

Just as the larger organization has strategies—plans—for share-

holder management, logistics, marketing, and the like, your

department or area has its own set of strategies for employee

Customer Relationship Management

retention, productivity, scheduling, and the like. Each of these

strategies must support managing customer relationships.

Sounds too logical to need to be mentioned. Yet it is all too easy

to forget. For example, in times of extremely low unemploy-

ment, how tempting is it to

keep a less than ideal

employee just to have a

more comfortable head-

count? Or, consider the

situation all too familiar to

call center environments,

where pressure to keep

calls short goes head to

head with taking the time

necessary to create a pos-

itive customer experience.

Now, let’s look at the

words, “creating, main-

taining and expanding.”

CRM is about the entire

customer cycle. This is

what we’ll discuss in Chapter 2 as the Customer Service/ Sales

Profile. When you implement your CRM strategy, you will cap-

ture and analyze data about your targeted customers and their

targeted buying habits. From this wealth of information, you can

understand and predict customer behavior. Marketing efforts,

armed with this customer intelligence, are more successful at

both finding brand new customers and cultivating a deeper

share of wallet from current customers. Customer contacts,

informed by detailed information about customer preferences,

are more satisfying.

Are you a manager whose area doesn’t deal with external

customers? This part of the definition still applies. First, you and

your team support and add value to the individuals in your organ-

ization who do come into direct contact with customers. Again

and again, the research has proven that external customer satis-

CRM Is Strategic

Make a list of the key strate-

gies that drive your area of responsi-

bility. What approach or plan deter-

mines your:

• Staffing levels?

• Productivity targets?

• Processes and procedures?

• Reporting?

Now, write down your organiza-

tion’s, or your personal, approach to

managing customer relationships.

Compare the CRM strategy with the

other key strategies. Do they support

the manner in which you want to inter-

act with customers? Why or why not?

Customer Relationship Management Is Not an Option

faction is directly propor-

tional to employee satisfac-

tion. That means that the

quality of support given to

internal customers predicts

the quality of support that

is given to external cus-

tomers. Second, consider

your internal customers as

advocates for your depart-

ment or area. For you and

your team, CRM is about growing advocates and finding new

ways to add value.

Finally, what do we mean by “customer relationships” in

today’s economy, where we do business with individuals and

organizations whom we may never meet, may never want to meet,

much less know in a person-to-person sense? CRM is about creat-

ing the feel of high touch in a high tech environment. Consider the

success of Amazon.com. Both of us are frequent customers and

neither of us has ever spoken to a human being during one of our

service interactions. Yet, we each have a sense of relationship with

Amazon. Why? Because the CRM tools that support Amazon’s

customer relationship strategy allow Amazon to:

• Add value to customer transactions by identifying relat-

ed items with their “customers who bought this book

also bought” feature, in much the same way that a retail

clerk might suggest related items to complete a sale.

• Reinforce a sense of relationship by recognizing repeat

shoppers and targeting them with thank you’s ranging

from thermal coffee cups to one-cent stamps to ease the

transition to new postal rates.

In short, customers want to do business with organizations

that understand what they want and need. Wherever you are in

your organization, CRM is about managing relationships more

effectively so you can drive down costs while at the same time

increasing the viability of your product and service offerings.

External customers

Those outside the organiza-

tion who buy the goods and

services the organization sells.

Internal customers A way of

defining another group inside the

organization whose work depends on

the work of your group.Therefore,

they are your “customers.” It’s your

responsibility to deliver what they need

so they can do their jobs properly.

McGraw-Hill - Briefcase Books - Customer Relationship Management.pdf

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