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What Is CRM?

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and MARKETING to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target MARKETING strategies to competitive positioning tactics.

 CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics.

Once thought of as a type of software, CRM has evolved into a customer-centric philosophy that must permeate an entire organization. There are three key elements to a successful CRM initiative: people, process, and technology. The people throughout a company-from the CEO to each and every customer service rep-need to buy in to and support CRM. A company's business processes must be reengineered to bolster its CRM initiative, often from the view of, How can this process better serve the customer? Firms must select the right technology to drive these improved processes, provide the best data to the employees, and be easy enough to operate that users won't balk. If one of these three foundations is not sound, the entire CRM structure will crumble.

It's a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, MARKETING effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.

If customer relationships are the heart of business success, then CRM is the valve the pumps a company's life blood. As such, CRM is best suited to help businesses use people, processes, and technology to gain insight into the behavior and value of customers. This insight allows for improved customer service, increased call center efficiency, added cross-sell and upsell opportunities, improved close rates, streamlined sales and MARKETING processes, improved customer profiling and targeting, reduced costs, and increased share of customer and overall profitability.

Customer Relationship Management

6 Steps From Customer Service by Susan and Derek Nash One of the ongoing challenges successful businesses face is in optimizing customer satisfaction and developing Customer Relationship Management. So many companies "jump on the bandwagon" of improving customer service in order to impact customer retention levels. Yet, since 1994, customer satisfaction has dropped in nearly every sector of the economy according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index compiled by the University of Michigan. So why is this? Raising customer satisfaction levels requires a comprehensive systems approach. This article will cover: The importance of a clear customer experience strategy Selecting the correct people Developing, motivating and managing your people Establishing effective service delivery processes Building in continuous improvement Ensuring managers are the key change-agents

Customer Relationship Management Experts Susan and Derek Nash Susan and Derek Nash are joint owners of EM-Power, Inc. a consulting firm that works with a wide range of Fortune 500 organizations implementing customer relationship management strategies and developing effective leaders. They are authors of "Deliver Outstanding Service", and "Delighting your Customer" all published by How To Books. Contact Susan and Derek

Setting A Clear Customer Experience Strategy

Often organisations confuse defining a customer experience strategy with creating a "slogan". How many companies create a slogan without any supporting initiatives, thereby disillusioning employees and creating a "flavour of the month?"

To establish a good strategy certain key practices are required:

• Understand the overall organisational vision and mission
• Define the organisation's customer service direction, slogan and values
• Ensure customer service is defined as a key responsibility for the business/department
• Share the customer experience strategy via a comprehensive communications program
• Ensure that this strategy does not conflict with other business strategies. As consultants, it is amazing how often we hear organisations say, "Improving Customer Service is a priority, and we are also introducing stringent cost-cutting measures." This can present a tough dichotomy.

Selecting The Correct People

It's really hard to teach an elephant to dance!

When recruiting employees to provide customer service, the process often tends to concentrate more on functional expertise, technical competence and knowledge rather than interpersonal skills. However, lack of the right attitude can drastically impact client satisfaction levels. Research has in fact shown that attitude is the most important requirement: skills and functional expertise can be taught.

Therefore in selecting the right people:

• Define the critical job requirements
• Develop scenario-based interviews/assessment centres to screen and select candidates
• Involve multiple team members in the hiring process
• Ensure evaluation is based on objective, not the subjective "Be Like Me" criteria

In part two of this article, we will look at the remaining four key principles of making the transition from a customer service culture to customer relationship management

Best Practice: Requirements of CRM Processes

2012-09-24
It is imperative that companies have detailed knowledge of the behavior, needs, and hidden potential of their current and prospective customers – which they can apply to identify and take resolute actions for boosting revenues and income. Such knowledge can be gained primarily by:

• Expanding actionable knowledge, and systematically strengthening relationships with customers
• Contacting and caring for customers in a consistent manner
• Obtaining and applying information that is company and channel neutral
• Systematizing and optimizing customer-centric activities through the customer lifecycle

The requirements of CRM processes concern how to offer and provide services to customers, in order to maximize their level of satisfaction.
In this article, we address:

• The requirements that companies define for CRM processes in marketing, sales, and service
• How to analyze processes in a sound and structured manner and define requirements
• The success factors to consider in practice when defining the requirements of customer processes.

Put the customer in the spotlight
Most companies these days are quite opaque when it comes to the area of precise customer requirements. Achieving transparency on this facet alone would be a big leap forward in integrating customer requirements into company processes.
The key to success is to focus on processes that customers consider important. A strategic approach is necessary to identify such processes. This means conducting a top-down analysis to identify customer groups, their contact points, and long-term requirements. Although this may sound obvious, most companies underestimate the task at hand and are thus snowed under when trying to accomplish it. A strategic approach enables one to determine the weak points and incorporate the customer needs properly and on time into the required processes.
Customer processes are intertwined with the target groups and lifecycles – hence, they cannot be identified and analyzed in isolation. For instance, when launching a new product for group A customers, it may be important to quickly provide detailed information. This would mean focusing primarily on marketing processes like campaign management and sales processes like visiting the customers. For group B, on the other hand, it may be more significant to emphasize easy access to the service hotline and handle complaints promptly. This would mean highlighting services like queries and complaints management. From a corporate perspective too, the goals to be achieved will differ, for example, “ensure multichannel communications at all times,” or “provide good access via the call center,” or “make all employees aware of customer preferences and customer histories,” or “clearly define processes for managing complaints

In March of 2013, Microsoft officially supported access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Apple’s iPad platform through the Safari web browser.  The following section discusses which devices are supported and on which platforms, as well as the features and limitations of the original release.

Supported environments/devices

For the server component, iPad access to Dynamics CRM is limited to CRM Online.  It is not currently supported for on-premise customers. Additionally, CRM Online customers need to accept the product update from the Settings -> Administration page of CRM Online.

On the client side, iPad access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online requires IOS6.0 and above.  This eliminates the 1st generation iPad from consideration as Apple currently limits the IOS to version 5.1 and has no plans to update the 1st generation to IOS6.  Additionally, iPad support is limited to the full size iPad as the iPad Mini is not supported.  On full-sized iPad’s with IOS 5.1 or older operating systems, the user is redirected to Mobile Express automatically.  Users with the iPad mini are not redirected to Mobile Express.

Features

The following features are supported:

General optimizations. To optimize the experience on the iPad, Microsoft included several features and enhancements.  For starters, both landscape and portrait mode is supported.  To save space and reduce the number of popups, the ribbon bar and help visor were removed.  In addition to limiting the number of popups, many remaining popups were flattened including entity lookups.

Dashboards. As with out of the box CRM Online, the dashboard page is your initial landing spot.   You can customize your default dashboard and easily switch between dashboards with the dashboard picker.  The dashboards fully render inside Safari and you also have drill down capabilities into each chart as you do in the web client.  Unfortunately, you are not able to create new dashboards at this time.