CRM: Character and Action

Wherever there are business activities, there will be customer relations and CRM. CRM goes hand in hand with business. But people turn a blind eye to it.

"You China invented CRM 5,000 years ago. Didn't you? Because at that time, you became the first country in the world to actually do business!" CRM expert Jay Curry and Bob Thompson (Bob Thompson) was interviewed by this issue to discuss the heroic nature of CRM and the way to implement it.

Curry is the founder of the "Customer Marketing" concept and CRM methodology, and Thompson is the founder of CRMGuru.com, the world's largest CRM organization.

Heroism: Building Loyalty

Thompson begins by stating the true nature of CRM: "Loyalty! The soul of CRM is to build loyal relationships. Without loyal customers, your business cannot be profitable. Fig. Maybe you are very good at selling, marketing, and acquiring new customers to increase revenue, but customers often abandon you because of the sharp decline in experience. So we have to find ways to 'freeze' customers. Just better, more Marketing, selling quickly doesn't help, it's not CRM, it's just sales, sales, sales! The interesting thing about CRM work is that you have to do everything possible to coordinate service, sales and marketing around loyal customer relationships to make profits. Maximize."

The key to being a CRM hero is to look at CRM from a competitive point of view. He said: "The question is not that you can do CRM yourself, but how good is your CRM compared to your competitors? How competitive is your CRM?"

So, how to judge your CRM is better than the competition The superiority of the opponent? He went on to say: "Why do customers abandon you? This is a very important question. There have been many studies on this issue, and one of the findings is that 2 out of 3 customers who abandon you are because of your offering. The reason for the service, not because your product is not good or the price of the product is not right. Therefore, you must have a deep understanding of how customers compare your service to your competitors.

"You can also put Compare the quality of your customer relationship with your competitor's. For example, you can pretend to be a competitor's customer and call them to understand the quality of their customer relationship. Plus, you can outpace your competitors in terms of speed, which means you can execute your CRM faster than they do. "

Think Big, Start Small

Is there any way to execute a CRM program?" No," Curry said, "but the basic idea is 'think big, start small' (Think big, start small). "

In most companies, without the active participation of senior managers, the CRM plan cannot be successfully implemented. This is Currie's personal experience: "China should have a great revolution in CRM, and Chinese companies should set up a chief customer officer. There are two main reasons. One is the internal impact of the company, that is, the establishment of the chief customer officer shows employees the commitment and investment of the company's decision-makers to customers.

"The second is the impact on the customer. With titles like VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, VP of Sales and Marketing, the customer thinks: I know his job is to sell I give him money. But the chief customer officer is different, he will say to the customer (although his ultimate purpose is to make money): Mr. customer, I am here to provide you with the services and products you need, to help you Make money. I'm your fan, and if you run into a problem, I'll make sure it's fixed. That way, the customer sees the chief customer officer as a partner, not a money grabber."

Implemented in CRM In the past, a common mistake that companies make is to put technology first, process second, and people second. Currie points out that the correct order is just the opposite. "You have to get people to think what customers think, then design your business process, and then adapt the technology to the process," Curry said.

"Starting small" in CRM implementation also means that unless you are a micro-company, you should start by implementing a demonstration CRM project. Currie pointed out: "Demonstration projects are generally implemented in a small department, business unit or region. Calling it a 'demonstration project' is to send a message to all employees, that is, 'We sincerely embrace the CRM strategy and demonstrate Projects will help us find the best way to implement CRM wins across the company. Even if we make mistakes, because the demonstration projects are small, it doesn't hurt the whole company." "Starting small" also means supporting middle managers. It is the middle managers of the company who implement the CRM program, and it is they who are responsible for motivating their subordinates. "Therefore, three things should be done to them: one is to obtain their unanimous agreement and support for the CRM plan; the second is to train them in relevant CRM knowledge and skills, and then let them train their own people; the third is to train and guide them change management capabilities," Currie said.

Establishing a client team is also a powerful move to "start small". The customer team is to form a team with all the people who have contact with a similar customer in the customer pyramid, including field sales personnel, telemarketing personnel, service personnel and marketing personnel, etc. Curry points out: "You often see all kinds of bizarre things happening in companies: the marketing department sends out four letters a year to customers that say 'We love you, we love you, we love you!' According to the invoice, the department sent 12 reminders to the same customers - 'pay, or die!' The establishment and operation of the customer team, coupled with the chief customer officer responsible for regulating all customer contacts and communications throughout the company, this serious conflict It's hard for this situation to happen again."

Customer Analysis, Tailored

The immediate goal of CRM is to increase, retain, and upgrade your customers. To do this, you need to conduct a differential analysis of your customers to lay the foundation for individualized management of different types of customer relationships. Enterprises don't have to make a secret of this, because after analysis, dividing customers into three, six, nine, etc., does not mean discriminatory treatment of them, but to better tailor and customize effective strategies for relationship management.

Curry pointed out that customer analysis is mainly through the situation analysis of the company's customer performance (including customer value, customer behavior and customer satisfaction) and the company's attention to customers (specifically, organization, communication, and information) to analyze the situation. Discover management strategies to achieve the immediate goals of CRM. That is: to draw the top of the customer pyramid, first collect and sort the behavior variables of all customers (usually sales revenue), form a "customer ranking table", and then subdivide the customers in the table into top customers (sales revenue ranks in the top 1 % of active customers), high-end customers (the next 4% of active customers in sales revenue), mid-end customers (the next 15% of active customers in sales revenue), and low-end customers (the remaining 80% of active customers in sales revenue) active customers).

Add in those inactive customers who have purchased your products and services but haven't purchased again in a long time, as well as your potential and wait-and-see customers, and you're done The customer pyramid of wait-and-see customers, potential customers, inactive customers, low-end customers, mid-end customers, high-end customers, and top customers is now. In this way, how to add new customers to the tower, upgrade low-level customers to high-level customers, and keep customers in the tower becomes the decision goal of customer analysis.

Analyzing customer value completes the following tasks in order: determine your profit; define all your marketing and sales costs; calculate average sales revenue per customer, average profit margin per customer, and return on investment in marketing and sales; Profits and costs are distributed across the various levels of the customer pyramid. So far, sales revenue, profit, and cost have been allocated to each customer tier, so you can then infer the ratio of the profit of each customer tier to the profit margin of a single customer, and calculate the relevant data for a specific customer. From that, you can do a scenario analysis: "If I don't add fixed costs and move 6 low-end customers up the pyramid - 3 are mid-range customers, 2 are high-end customers, and 1 is top customer , what will be the result?" Using information technology, you will easily find out how much your sales revenue and profit have increased.

Analyze customer behavior in order to sort out the percentage of customer spend with your company as a percentage of the customer's total spend on products and services similar to your company's, the duration of the customer's buying relationship with your company, and customer movement within the pyramid On the basis of the situation, you can develop a feasible customer change plan through scenario analysis.

Analyzing customer satisfaction There are two approaches to analyzing customer satisfaction, which help you identify areas where customers think you need to improve your business, and individual customer satisfaction analysis, which helps you find customers with greater potential to improve profitability method of satisfaction.

Analyzing customer focus focuses on: how your company's management deals with customers; how your employees or colleagues increase or decrease customer satisfaction; what you and your company should say to customers and how to say it; how to plan And implement the communication with customers; the relevance, completeness and timeliness of the customer information you have; whether the system for managing customer information is working well.