When we discuss CRM, we often refer to two specific scenarios: a call center that stores customer contact information and records their inquiries or issues and another case where potential customers are registered for sales teams to contact and sell services or products. However, CRM encompasses much more than that.
CRM, an abbreviation for Customer Relationship Management, represents the process or set of processes through which we interact with customer information and build relationships based on past interactions. It also involves structuring relationships with future customers. For future purposes, it is crucial to connect marketing contacts made to convince customers of the superiority of the offered service or product. Therefore, CRM should record the presented offers and the employed negotiation strategies. As for current customers, it is essential to register every interaction they have with the company, whether for changes, issues, inquiries, or compliments. CRM serves as a comprehensive profile of potential and current customers from start to finish.
One of the primary challenges in implementing CRM is the heterogeneity of platforms. Often, there is no unified platform, and each department has its own, resulting in fragmented customer or potential customer information. Consequently, when contact is made or received, complete information is often lacking, leading to customer or potential customer discomfort. Addressing this issue requires designing CRM at a high level and not treating it as an isolated need within the company, avoiding additional CRM tool purchases that incur unnecessary costs and hinder the objective of gaining a deep understanding of the market. Suppose top management levels aim to unify information whenever the market interacts with the company. In that case, the company can respond more appropriately to customer expectations, resulting in simplified sales processes and reduced customer churn.
Another significant flaw in CRM is its heavy reliance on customers contacting the company, such as calling the call center, complaining on social media, or raising questions via WhatsApp. When a service is technology-based, such as a web portal, marketplace, or mobile application, there is an excellent opportunity for constant customer contact. Unfortunately, this valuable information is often underutilized.
Real-time information captured from transaction execution or usage of technological services, when monitored, can serve as a foundation for understanding customer habits and identifying service behaviors more clearly. For example, if we know that a customer typically connects weekly for purchases and there is a week when they don’t, or if a customer regularly executes monetary transactions at the beginning of each month and they haven’t done so this month, or if a user consumes a certain amount of data during nighttime hours and they haven’t done so this week, all these indications suggest something unusual that deserves attention.
In such cases, the company can proactively reach out to the customer instead of waiting for them to initiate contact, as the latter often yields unsatisfactory outcomes. This proactive approach allows for service improvements and stronger customer relationships. By identifying moments of failure, bottlenecks, transactional delays, seasonal consumption comparisons against actual consumption, and purchasing patterns, among other examples, the company can determine the right time to apologize, offer enhancements, upgrade the plan’s capacity, or provide promotions tailored to consumption habits. It will lead to more effective loyalty and retention management.
So, to achieve customer loyalty, it is essential to monitor each step involved in a technological service and understand the relationship between the use of these platforms and customers and how the growth of technology will bring benefits to the client or how when the technology fails will bring problems to the client too. The next step is to identify valuable technical indicators, such as smooth transactions, slow transactions, or transactions with failures. These indicators should be identified and stored at measurable time intervals, establishing usage patterns and identifying projections to determine when a customer deviates from their average. All this information will go into the CRM system to analyze and implement appropriate contact strategies.
As we can see, this presents a different approach to the typical concept of CRM. It requires hard work and a deep understanding of the services, leading to closer customer relationships, contributing to a good reputation, stable income, and assured growth.
By: Luis José Pulido, General Manager at BPS Tech Solutions.