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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.







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