We Blog CRM

In response to a study recently undertaken by CRM Guru in which seventy percent of customers stated that poor customer service caused them to switch services, Amae Software Co-founder / CEO Vance Christensen offered his analysis of differences between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty on the TMCnet website.

Customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, says Christensen, are both founded by customer experience. They are interdependent but possess completely different metrics which demand independent attention. The former, opines Christensen, “is a requirement to do business” while the latter is “the basis for sustained profitability and growth.” Customer satisfaction as a concept acts as a barometer of customer expectations exceeded. This can often be a dead end street, however.

One job performed to above the anticipated level of service, one happy customer. Period. Nothing regarding future sales is indicated with the completion of a single task. The fact of the matter is that, once a superior alternative is presented, even the most satisfied of customers is capable of jumping ship, loyalty be damned. Customer loyalty, argues Christensen, must therefore include “an emotional connection” to the provider, with the customer aware of his role in the business process.

Christensen goes on to offer a checklist of eight areas in which customer loyalty can be differentiated from customer satisfaction: pricing, payment, referrals, turnover, competitive data, perception, contract, and “difficult times.” Once presented with the list, the differences are pretty easily imaginable: Under payment, for example, Christensen points out that “Satisfied customers pay at their discretion. Loyal customers pay on time.” The most compelling information offered by Christensen here is a statistic he presents to show that the turnover rate of satisfied customers is a minimum fifteen percent, whereas the loyal customer turnover holds at a maximum of five percent.

Where customer loyalty is based in an emotional connection, experiences and people, customer satisfaction conversely begins and ends with the product and service provision. Christensen emphasizes that the keys to creating and spurring on customer loyalty are “Understanding drivers of customer satisfaction at granular levels [and] taking timely action to improve them. He goes on to cite a concrete example undertaken at Amae Software. An unnamed customer who leveraged Amae technology in the hopes of improving understanding of their customer base was shocked to find that, in one segment, more than eleven percent of their customers planned a switchover. Via addressing perceptual issues of their customers, Amae wooed back eighty-eight percent of the “satisfied” (but not loyal) customers.

Though a bit esoteric for the management world, Christensen’s philosophical outpouring should be considered from a real-world perspective. “Customer loyalty” and “customer satisfaction” may be abstractions based in a touchy feely world of “people persons,” but these intangibles become real enough when considering the bottom line.

Customer Process Management is the process of integrating BPM and CRM technologies. The genesis of CPM can be traced to the efforts of companies to automate routine operational activities which led to the development of standalone BPM.

However, integrating disparate automated functionalities was not sufficient if companies wished to keep up with the ever rising consumer expectations. The objective of CPM is to ensure that processes take into account customer preferences and can be repeated to provide personalized and efficient service.

CPM allows businesses to optimize processes and cull the most relevant information from the CRM database such that a customer-facing process can be executed with maximum effectiveness. It also results in all departments in an enterprise operating on the same wavelength with respect to CRM. crm-daily.com says:

First and foremost, customer processes are dynamic. With conventional applications, the control to create and evolve processes resides with the IT department. The programming of processes and business rules takes time and resources, and competes with other IT priorities.

Go to: Discovering the Benefits of Customer Process Management

The web has impacted marketing and advertising in a major way and the growth of broadband has brought more people within proximity of companies that have an online presence. The growth of broadband has also meant that the consumer can decide upon the time and extent to which he wishes to interact with a company online. Companies that have realized this are concentrating on building their web presence in a manner that will allow users to enjoy as personalized an experience as possible. crm-daily.com says:

Companies using content management solutions (CMS) now are attempting to use this process to cover records management, digital asset management and collaboration, as well as the typical document management, Web content management, and imaging — all of which contribute to the personalization of the end-user experience.

Go to: A New Look at Web Site Personalization

A blog is a fairly recent but very popular tool to get people to listen to you and interact with them. A blogger has a very good chance to convert the audience into customers for his products and services. Thus, blogs are an addition to the number of channels that have existed so far for buyer-seller interaction. According to Technorati, which is a search-engine scanning the web for blogs, there are close to 20 million blogs an approximately 1.6 billion links to blogs. The conversational format of blogs along with their low set-up charges make blogs an ideal channel for communicating with potential customers. crm-daily.com says:

Bloggers gain audiences by posting to other blogs and linking back to their own blogs. Some stay current by subscribing to a tool such as RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, which alerts readers to new postings.

Go to: Harnessing the Marketing Power of Blogs

Americans are turning to online bill payment in a big way and in the next five years 47 million U.S families will be utilizing online bill payment services. The majority of users are going to be young people at ease with technology. e-bill presentation and payment (EBPP) users will largely be comprised of Gen Y and Gen X individuals.