Changing the Consumer Focus

Formalizing New Customer Relations is the Current Reality of CRM

Jan 27, 2009

Organizations which previously established successful customer relationships need to make these relationships into new, definable customer strategies.

Establishing a foundation for continuing gains in an era when the customer reigns supreme means that businesses must change their focus to ensure that customer relationship practices maximize customer benefit. Business must give each individual customer a reason to keep coming back. To do that, they have to know what customers need and want.

Knowing Your Customers

When a business knows its customers and targets its communications to their specific interests and shopping behaviors, the result is increased revenue and loyal, long-term customers. This is the power of one-to-one CRM. If the CRM practitioner cannot focus on individual customer transactions, both in the process of segmentation and in the contact strategy, CRM strategies will not be successful.

Tracking the transactional details of customer purchases allows you to communicate with them in the most effective way possible. CRM has the capability to maximize the benefit of the commercial relationship with each individual customer.

With practices that have evolved in the retail industry, for example, every business can effectively define a customer’s needs, without incremental cost or complexity. Using these practices enables an organization to accomplish the following objectives:

The next phase in the CRM evolution is the era of exact transaction analysis, a customer-focused model that allows even the largest organizations to achieve the old style of customer service once again.

For these companies, the implementation path may have been filled with hurdles and the pace of implementation has been far slower and more frustrating than anticipated. However, there are proven processes and techniques that organizations can follow to provide a high probability of success.

Successful CRM Strategies

To reinforce the validity of CRM, a corporate system that classifies as a major development project in any organization, analyzing some of the many successful implementations of CRM strategies from a wide range of business sectors is an extremely useful endeavor. These implementations have taken place globally, in major business organizations, many of which are household names.

Over the past several years, proven development and implementation processes, as well as enabling technologies, have evolved and continue to evolve, and are available for examination and evaluation, to assist other organizations to dramatically accelerate the transition to a successful CRM solution. As well, these case study examples can assist organizations in avoiding some of common errors that have resulted in unsuccessful CRM implementations.

Project-oriented Issues

For companies assessing a CRM strategy or in the process of implementation, there are many project-oriented issues to be resolved. Here are some of the important ones:

Making the Change to Customer-centricity

Establishing successful customer relationships using proven methods of tracking and analyzing customer behaviour, can increase sales and revenues as well as profitibability. Applying the lessons learned by other organizations, along with the methodologies and technologies available today, can enable any organization to make the change from a product or service-oriented organization to one of being customer-focused, providing strong returns on the CRM investment in a matter of months rather than years.

The copyright of the article Changing the Consumer Focus in Customer Management is owned by Duane Sharp. Permission to republish Changing the Consumer Focus in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.