The customer is king

With so little to differentiate between you and the competition these days, the customer experience is a key part of your arsenal. Michael Thomas, National President of the CRM Association talks to us about the value of CRM in your enterprise.

CXO. Is it possible to increase retention and grow relationships through customer interaction?
MT. I feel that effective customer interaction is vital today mainly due to the competitive atmosphere and power shift that benefits the customer. Customer Satisfaction does not always mean what it implies, in order to increase retention and growing relationships you want to create advocates. The mere fact that a customer would refer business is a great indication of a win-win scenario. The customer lives in a world of Web 2.0 practices where collaboration that is created by Web 2.0 it can be good and bad. A customer advocate can only enhance their experience and give a company a great venue to improve products, interactions and positive earnings.

CXO. How important is to be able to leverage customer data to drive value-based product recommendations and cross/upsell offers & enhance customer experience?
MT. One size does not fit all, and having good data to reveal the best characteristics of your best customer will give a marketing executive the ability to model and seek out like companies to sell to. Having this data can also lend direction to enhancing current products and planning for additional products to roll out. It is very important to know the good, bad and ugly of your customer data. Being able to model behaviour and buying trends will keep you from marketing incorrect messages to the wrong people thus causing a low ROI on marketing dollars. Enhancing the customer experience will assist in gathering more share of the customer’s wallet.

CXO. Can using more intelligent customer interactions increase profit?
MT. No doubt having intelligent customer interactions will allow you to project earnings of your current customers over time, as the customer grows their value grows.

CXO. Can CRM be used to leverage event-based marketing?
MT. If CRM is used properly and information is tracked properly used to create a profile that can be leveraged by events so the right message gets to the right person at the right time. CRM in this case is tracking company information in all three components, Marketing, Sales and Service.

CXO. What are the business benefits of outsourcing customer care to a specialist?
MT. What you have to realize is that you are outsourcing the main touch points of the customer to someone outside of your company. Having this outsourced specialist contact may look good on the surface but if there is a disconnect with your company’s values it can spell disaster. It is very important that ramping up a specialist with the right company training and setting up the right metrics to track what is going on.

CXO. In your opinion, what issues in general need addressing in the industry?
MT. I think companies have to rethink their CRM strategy and migrate it to a more Customer Experience Management model. Earlier CRM initiatives were pretty much one-sided and one directional. The emphasis today should focus on aligning their CRM strategy, with the customer facing employees and making sure that the customer is actually receiving and acting upon this strategy.

Michael Thomas is National President and Board member of the CRM Association (www.crmassociation.org). In 2004 he received the CRM Magazine Most Influential CRM Leader Award. In 2005-2007 he was the Peppers and Rogers Group 1to1 Impact Awards Judge. He is Advisory Board member of CRMandDW Experts.com, and is on the Editorial Advisory Panel of Touch Briefings. He also co-hosts the radio show “Technology for Business Sake” www.businesstechnologyradio.com.

ABOUT THE CRMA
PROVIDING A VALUABLE EXPERIENCE FOR CUSTOMER CENTERED INDUSTRY
CRM Association represents the CRM industry and all its constituents. CRM represents what is now becoming an organized body of knowledge and strategy to be reckoned with. The CRM Association aims at representing the industry as not just a purveyor of knowledge and information, but an action-oriented association that will protect and promote the interests of customer relationship management and its institutions and provide the members with the tools that it needs to enrich and improve that customer experience – be it the member’s direct customers or the customers of the members customers.