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Total customer satisfaction – The missing factor : Go beyond the maxim – “Customer is always right”

11 Jan 2016 - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Customer relationship management (CRM) has suddenly become the talk of the town. It is now a worldwide focus on customers, covered in popular media and within corporate boardrooms. In modern acceptance, CRM is much broader than the age-old principle that “the customer is always right”. It identifies how to profitably act on that premise, at all times, across all channels and functions.
Consider the local butcher of a few decades ago. When a female customer walked into the shop, the butcher said hello and greeted the customer. The butcher knew the customer and also how she wanted her steaks and chops trimmed. He knew her family always preferred ground sirloin in the weekends. She appreciated the personalized service she received. Both the butcher and the customer profited from this loyalty relationship.
The old-fashioned butcher understood his customers and promptly responded to their needs. In recent years, contemporary marketers have realized that they can learn a lot from shopkeepers of the past. Contemporary marketers recognize that once a sale occurs, the company must stress managing relationships that will bring about additional exchanges.
Making a sale should not be viewed as the end of the marketing process but rather as the start of the organisation’s relationship with a customer. The sale merely consummates the courtship. Then the marriage begins. How good the marriage is depends on how well the relationship is managed by the seller.
Particularly, the small firms, such as the traditional butcher, are always relationship oriented. They know that their customers-buyers, who purchase promises of satisfaction, prefer to do business repeatedly with people and organisations they trust. They know that establishing relationships with customers can increase long-run sales and reduce marketing costs. They know that not all customers want the same products and services. They know that two individuals may buy the same product for different reasons. They know that marketing to the existing customers to gain repeat business provides benefits to both the product offerings, remind customers of service requirements, know what other products a customer has purchased and so forth.

Benefits
Therefore, CRM is essentially a focus on providing optimal value to your customers - through the way you communicate with them, how you market to them and how you service them - as well as through the traditional means of product, price, promotion and place of distribution. Customers make buying decisions based on more than just price and more than just product. Customers make buying decisions based on their overall experience, which involves product and price but also includes the nature of all their interactions with you.
CRM enables you to focus on your organisation’s relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, service users, colleagues or suppliers. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond CRM as a sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business – from HR to customer services and supply chain management.

Why CRM?
A CRM system helps your business grow because it tracks the history of customer interactions. Why is this important? Simply because tracking is everything - from calls made and emails sent, to meetings held, presentations delivered and even the next steps needed to close the deal or grow that customer account.
To run smoothly, your business needs customer relationship data that’s automatically updated, with instant access for employees and provides a full history of all communications, meetings and documents shared.
With a CRM system, your business has one place to store every customer, every lead and every service request, all of their contact info, preferences and history so your conversations are always personal, relevant and up-to-date - all available on mobile, desktop and through powerful reports and dashboards.
Marketers can also use CRM to better understand the pipeline of prospective sales making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You’ll have clear visibility of the path from enquiry to sale, available wherever and whenever you need it.

Challenge
An active sales team generates a flood of data. They can be out on the road talking to customers, meeting prospects and finding out valuable information – but all this information gets stored in handwritten notes, laptops and palmtops or inside the heads of your salespeople.
Details can get lost, meetings are not followed up promptly and prioritising customers can be a matter of guesswork rather than a rigorous exercise based on fact. And it can all be compounded if a key salesperson moves on.
On top of this, your customers may be contacting you on a range of different platforms – phone, email and social media – asking questions, following up on orders or complaining. Without a common platform for customer interactions, communications can be missed or lost in the flood of information – leading to an unsatisfactory response to your customer.
Even if you do successfully collect all this data, you’re faced with the challenge of making sense of it. It can be difficult to extract intelligence. Reports can be hard to create and waste valuable selling time. Managers can lose sight of what their teams are up to in reality, which means that they can’t offer the right support at the right time – while a lack of oversight can also result in a lack of accountability from the team.
In essence, the CRM approach represents further step in the development of the traditional concept of marketing a philosophy or a way of transforming an organisation as an integrated system where all aspects work to satisfy customer needs (of course at a profit). Integrated systems require access to information that cuts across all functional areas of the company. Satisfying customer needs implies a necessity to acquire information before, during and after the sale.
While not-for-profit organisations may prefer a term such as ‘donations’ to the term ‘profit’, the issue remains one of comparing costs to the benefits of alternative actions. A charity should enhance the proportion of funds used to benefit others (its profit) as opposed to spending all the donations on administrative functions. And, as such, organisations consider the long-term best interests of a society, they tend to choose actions that benefit the economy and people who are behaving in an ethical manner.

CRM process
There is a universal, underlying cycle of activity that should drive all CRM initiatives. All initiatives and infrastructure development should somehow be linked to this core cycle of activity. As a cycle, the stages are interdependent and continuous. They are interdependent in that you cannot implement some stages without the others.
Consider three points. (1) Customization of products and services for customers requires an understanding of who your customers are, (2) Interaction arid delivery of increased value to customers requires development and customization of products and services to meet their needs, (3) Retention of customers requires this delivery of increased value.
The cycle is continuous in that relationships by their nature involve an ongoing series of interactions. As you repeat this cycle with any customer or group of customers: (1) Your CRM strategies and initiatives will become increasingly sophisticated, (2) Customers will take notice of what you are doing for them, (3) You will thereby benefit from increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and profitability, provided that you continue the cycle and continue to invest in customer relationships.

(Next week: Going beyond CRM)
(Lionel Wijesiri, a corporate director with over 25 years’ senior managerial experience, can be contacted at [email protected])

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Total customer satisfaction – The missing factor : Go beyond the maxim – “Customer is always right”

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