Critical Aspects of Customer Relationship Management

Critical Aspects of Customer Relationship Management

Overview

Rich customer relationships that generate loyalty and revenue are critical to sustained business performance. Now more than ever, organizations must be able to flexibly adapt to the unique needs of individual customers. To meet this challenge, companies of all sizes are deploying Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications and strategies across their organizations. They are coordinating multiple channels: including the web, email, call centers, direct mail and face to face – to interact with customers and meet their needs.

Profitable customer relationships begin with sound planning. Actionable strategies for collecting customer data, mining it for valuable insight and cost effectively building these relationships are required to drive results. Firms must identify their Most Valuable Customers, interact with them across all channels and meet their needs.

The ability of the organization to interact effectively with stakeholders depends on the quality and nature of the data, how the company derives insights from the data, and how it makes the data or the analysis available to the appropriate interface. Over time, customer loyalty, satisfaction and share-of-customer revenue increase, while costs decrease.

The term CRM has become an over used and often misunderstood term in recent Marketing Strategies. It is mostly equated to IT solutions that build electronic interfaces between a business and their customers. It is much more than that. CRM is all about the Total Customer Experience that a person has with a business that through multiple interactions across channels. Before CRM, there was database marketing. There always existed benefits in understanding customers and targeting them based on better information. When used properly this makes the customer experience more relevant and acceptable for the customer.

This paper is divided into 7 sections which describe critical aspects of Customer Relationship Management. We will investigate best practices that successful companies have developed with their CRM Marketing Strategies, and we will develop several Sales Strategies they we can use to position Direct Mail as a marketing tactic to enhance any CRM strategy.

Customer Segmentation

Any discussion surrounding CRM should include discussion around customer segmentation an...

... middle of paper ...

...oward their products.

Finding # 3 gives us the opportunity to demonstrate how mail can how customize messages to local sectors of a company. Building relevant geographic messaging can improve a company’s customer relationship by building the local customer connection.

Finding # 7, this is a critical point in all CRM strategies. The customer wants to be reached through a medium that they prefer and the messaging through all mediums must be consistent. Mail offers a platform to build upon for all messaging. Customers will read details within a mail piece that can better explain products or services than web messaging or even face to face interaction. Mail can become the cornerstone medium for all messaging through all channels.

Finding #10 speaks of accountability, and mail is noted as the best media to perform a measurable, accountable ROI for advertising dollars.

In conclusion, as we can see Direct Mail fulfills many opportunities for a company to communicate with their customers, through a relevant data intelligent dialog. Once we have started the conversation of customer segmentation with a company we are uniquely positioned to make the Mail Moment work for them.