The Virtues of CRM

Tomorrow's businesses need to be more competitive against increased customer expectations in terms of improved customer cycle times and higher ROI. The playing field has changed forever... adapt or perish. It is no longer acceptable to do business and not embrace the Internet. The covergence of voice and data, affordable broadband, the ubiquitous mobile phones, PDAs and PC desktops has given unparallel powers to business users. To compete successfully, business need to constantly redefine and better their customer value propositions both from the supply (delivering a better mousetrap) and demand (providing better and personalised services) sides.

Against this backdrop of having to constantly do more with less, enterprises need to be nimble, with the ability to fine tune their processes and enhance their performance. Businesses prosper and disintegrate by the effectiveness of their customer value propositions. Speed and timing is everything.

Customer Winning Strategies

• Customer Mantras - What Do you Stand For?
• What Are You Doing? - Do you practice what you preach?
• What Does it Take to Win? - Money, Process, Technology, People
• What Have You Got?

Unless the above are in balance, rushing out to acquire a CRM is not going to cut it. If you're having steak for dinner, you rush out and buy a cow. Worse still, you employ consultants to tell you what type of cows you should buy!

What Does it Take to Win?

A winning customer strategy does not imply the need for a technology solution (The "Why of CRM"). The questions that should be asked are what problems (supply or demand side), challenges (processes) and opportunities are you trying to solve, and what are you shooting for (performance metrics) to make a difference? Having satisfied yourselves that you need a CRM mousetrap (technology) in order to realise your customer winning strategies, you need to decide who to choose for the job.

• What Have You Got?
• Existing systems - where are the leakeages?
• People - who is going to do the job?
• Processes - more streamline ways of cutting the cookie
• "Build versus Buy" - do you need a full blown CRM?
• "Buy Who?"