January 1999
From Prospect To Loyal Customer
BY MATTHEW VARTABEDIAN, TECHNOLOGY EDITOR,
C@LL CENTER SOLUTIONS
Customer relationship management, or CRM for short, is becoming a popular term. It's
catchy - I've found myself using it daily, but the more I use it the less I seem to
understand the term. So, let's examine it by beginning with a few questions. What is a
customer relationship? How can a corporation have a "relationship" - which by
definition implies some kind of emotional connection - with many individual customers?
What departments within a company would be responsible for creating and maintaining that
relationship? What kind of technology would be required to manage customer relationships?
And what (the million-dollar question) is the role of the call center?
The Customer Relationship
A customer is someone who has purchased something from your company. It follows, quite
naturally, that having made that purchase, you and your customer are now in a state that
"involves mutual dealings between people or parties or countries," at least
according to the rather bland definition the dictionary offers. What you should hope to
cultivate, however, is a state of connectedness, affinity, fellow-feeling - something that
involves the customer's emotions, but is wholly other than thoughts of price or
quality
something almost indefinable but intertwined with his or her thoughts of your
company and its products, something that is difficult for your competitor to duplicate.
That something is service - reactive (customers call you for help) or proactive (you
know enough about your customers, based on past interactions, to identify and fill their
needs almost before they know of them.) A company begins to develop a personality when it
responds on an individual level to end user concerns, thus making it "able" to
have a relationship with a customer. The agent of interaction (call center rep, field
sales/service, IVR/ACD/auto attendant or Web page) you deploy as your initial point of
contact with customers becomes the company representative.
If you agree, moving forward, that it's less expensive (and more profitable) to retain
a satisfied customer than it is to acquire a new one, and if you agree that a satisfied
customer is more likely to buy from you again, then you should also agree that making the
effort to cultivate an emotional relationship with the customer makes sense. It is
therefore imperative that any "agent of interaction" be tasked with that goal
above all others, and that is what CRM is all about - building a meaningful, long-term,
one-to-one dialog with your customers which will, in turn, generate profitable revenue
growth.
Conducting a meaningful customer dialog involves the acquisition of information unique
to each customer - shoe size, birthday, buying history, demographic data - whatever
information you have, whatever information you'd want to gather, can become useful in your
CRM strategy. Making that knowledge accessible to your employees, across all customer
contact points, will help your company to deliver a consistent, positive user experience.
Internal departments (marketing, sales, accounts, shipping, customer service), if
isolated from one another, splinter and compartmentalize the various activities involved
in serving the customer, which ultimately tends to inhibit relationship-building efforts.
This "dis-integration" may mean that customer information rarely finds its way
far enough into the organization to provide useful feedback to the various departments,
affecting the performance of product development, sales and marketing, accounts
receivable, etc. On the front-office side, lack of information negatively impacts the
ability of the agent to personalize the interaction, and thus, the relationship never
forms.
To alleviate this problem of managing activities that span functional barriers, why not
manage the activities in an integrated fashion that places the customer in the driver's
seat? By addressing customer acquisition, service and retention first, on a
customer-by-customer basis, the different internal departments' powers can be brought to
bear on an individual basis - as defined by the knowledge the company currently has about
the customer's preferences, likes/dislikes, purchase history, demographic data, etc.
Again, this "modus operandi" would have to be implemented across all touch
points, so that the customer is able to resolve his/her request irrespective of the touch
point chosen - voice, fax, chat, e-mail, Web.
Measurements and feedback from the customer would also help drive improvements in the
customer relationship management process, becoming an integral part of the process,
enabling it to evolve as customer needs/interests evolve, thus helping the company itself
to change with the times. No longer does the company act on the basis of internal
"whim," but rather on data provided by its customer base - the corporation and
customer relationship becomes symbiotic, the one providing exactly what the other needs.
The ability to cost-effectively do this and to segment customers in this manner depends
on the technology deployed. It also depends on how aggressively the company wants to
pursue this strategy, which essentially means the reorganization, rearrangement, or
perhaps even a complete overhaul, of existing business processes and/or departments.
Probably the best initial approach is to gather in a central place all the customer data
you possess. Then, mine that data. Discover the trends; correlate that information with
customer service histories. Find out what issues they had, find out what their preferences
were, etc. Then set up a system, based on technology and on business processes (applied
across touch points) to supplement and expand your information stores. Set up a process to
utilize the data on a consistent basis and in a format that makes sense for your various
internal departments. You should also consider enabling your front line (call center
agents, field sales/service personnel) to add immediate value to the customer interaction
(give them more authority, training, skills and knowledge so that they help in building
that relationship) and make it easy for them to relay customer requirements and issues to
upstream portions of the process.
While the real world doesn't necessarily fall into such neat, precise categories,
real-world examples of customer relationship management, in fact, abound. A friend of
mine, for instance, buys only Chevrolet. It's not that he's infatuated with the Lumina's
sleek lines or superior handling
he has found them to be reliable, comfortable,
mid-range cars. His loyalty rests solely upon the personal relationship his Chevy dealer
cultivated with him. His first purchase with this dealer, for example, was exceptional in
that it lacked the rigmarole normally associated with car buying - haggling, deceptions,
signed contracts, deposit, lack of trust. It was finalized with no more than a handshake.
My friend even expressed concern that he wouldn't like the car when he got it, but the
dealer put those fears to rest as well: "If you don't like the car, you don't have to
take it - but I'll make sure that doesn't happen."
The dealer's exceptional performance transformed my friend into a satisfied customer.
His continued, and genuine, interest in him as a person rather than as an object, his
willingness to do what it took to delight my friend with his purchase - from providing a
couple of free tubes of touch-up paint to fixing minor problems with no questions asked or
money exchanged -has turned my friend into a loyal customer.
The author can be contacted at mvartabedian@tmcnet.com. |