Customer Relationship Management - Take your performance to the next level

What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategic process designed to increase revenue and gain valuable insights into customers' needs and behaviors. This customer-centric philosophy has been widely adopted by various sizes of organizations. It brings together important information about customers from various data sources within the organization and presents a holistic view of each customer. This equips customer-facing staffs from sales, marketing, support to serve prospects and customers more effectively.

CRM provides a systematic way to collect information about customers, interactions, sales records, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and customer service history and feedbacks. The goal of collecting this information in a central repository is to gain insights into the behavior and value of customers. This insights about customers are useful for upselling, cross-selling, service improvement, higher forecast accuracy, better closing rate, effective marketing and customer profiling.

Challenges

Traditionally, companies compete in the product-focus arena. As technology advances over the decades, flexible production processes for both products & services have allowed companies to produce goods and services to meet market demands at low cost. A shift in focus from product-oriented business model to customer-centric business model has been taken place. With the enablement of internet and telecommunication technologies, companies move from providing a single channel of access to customers to multi-channel delivery. However, there are some challenges complicating this transition.

Firstly, organisations want to be able to communicate the same consistent message to the customer regardless of the channel being used. This demands a level of integration between customer-facing fronts and back-office operations and a consistency of access to data related to customers.

Secondly, organisations may face internal hurdles and resistance in analysing and reengineering their business processes when executing CRM strategy.

Last but not least, the lack of support from top management and senior executives is a major hindrance to success of CRM implementation.

Benefits

When a CRM strategy is successfully implemented, organisations will reap the following benefits.

  • Providing services and products that meet exactly the needs of customers
  • Better customer service
  • Effective cross-selling and upselling
  • Faster and higher rate of sales closure
  • Improved customers loyalty and satisfaction
What's Next?
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