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Advanced
How To Guide
Getting Close To Customers: Leapfrogging With eCRM
Designing The Digital Loyalty Cycle
If customer loyalty is the goal, eCRM is the tool. Although
companies can use eCRM to pursue benefits in any one
part of the business, the greatest benefits come from
using it to link every operation in a business that
affects the customer experience. Integrating and leveraging
efforts across pricing, product quality, marketing,
sales, and customer service through the digital loyalty
cycle will increasingly become the hallmark of successful
companies. By always working from a real-time perspective,
for example, front-line staff and strategic partners
can continuously improve the way they interact with
individual customers and segments. In doing so, they
not only can improve the customer experience, they can
also improve the way feedback from customers is leveraged
across product development, manufacturing, marketing,
sales, and service.
When executed correctly, eCRM implementations are designed
as a digital loyalty cycle that continuously improves
to create lasting competitive advantage. When a manufacturer
uses eCRM technology and redefines its business processes
in customer acquisition and retention, it strengthens
its capabilities in key areas that determine a customer's
purchase decision including pricing, product quality,
marketing, sales, and customer service to create a virtuous,
digital loyalty cycle. The impact of eCRM strategies
is beginning to show. In traditional call centres alone,
eCRM lets companies shift much of the people-intensive
customer service transactions to online transactions
that let customers serve themselves if they wish. Considering
the enormous cost of running call centres to serve customers
in multiple languages and cultures and legal environments
across Europe, the Internet provides a permanent but
flexible solution to handle this diverse and costly
set of requirements. Content created in one country
can be translated through software adapted to other
countries in near real-time.
The experience of System
Label, the Irish specialist printer of industrial
labels equipment, demonstrates how eCRM can increase
responsiveness to customer requirements. Since implementing
several system developments including a new eCRM package,
the company often turns around orders faster than its
5 day target at the outset of the project.
With eCRM, customer-centric manufacturers can use customer
information to better predict customers' buying patterns,
which allows them to better manage pricing and marketing
decisions in real time. Behind the scenes of the eCRM
systems are conventional, perhaps, but crucial components
for success: business processes, technologies, and people.
When it comes to business processes, manufacturing companies
must understand the customer loyalty cycle and use an
integrated approach across the organisation to strengthen
loyalty. That is, they must synchronize and differentiate
everything that affects an individual customer's loyalty:
brand, quality, price, sales, and service experience.
It is no small task, but by first focusing on the customers
that are most profit-able and key to future survival,
companies can leverage eCRM where it matters most.
In terms of technology, companies must use IT to gather,
analyse and disseminate information from customers across
the enterprise. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
can serve as the foundation. For some, a web-based approach
is likely to be both faster and cheaper. Leveraging
Internet technology eases the implementation burden
and increases flexibility in designing global and regional
manufacturing, distribution, and service networks. The
same comparison can be made between traditional CRM
and eCRM. That is, a typical installation of a CRM system
a few years ago would take, say, around 6-12 months.
Today, with eCRM, a similar, enhanced and more flexible
system based on Internet technology is not only less
expensive to install but also much quicker, taking just
about 3 to 6 months depending on the specific circumstances
of the company.
People are key to serving customers well. Companies
must therefore invest in people through continual learning,
such as just-in-time and cross training, to ensure that
they have the skills and mindset to achieve customer
loyalty goals. In addition, incentives should measure
and reward customer satisfaction and loyalty. Base wages
and benefits may have to be upgraded, and knowledge
systems should be supported. Successful companies understand
that employee loyalty is crucial to building customer
loyalty.
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