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The four applications you need for excellent customer relationship management
Customer relationship management is a far-reaching field, and cannot be encapsulated in a single piece of software. A customer relationship management system may be presented as a multi-function application or set of applications, but no matter how many bells and whistles a particular CRM platform has, make sure it has these four-very important-applications:
Data mining
Data mining is often incorporated into the CRM equation for the purpose of gathering information about customer preferences. A separate data mining tool may parse information from multiple databases to spot trends, and allow management to determine optimal product configuration. Data mining requires a great deal of integration, often between databases maintained by multiple departments within a corporation. As such, data mining is an executive initiative that requires buy-in from the boardroom, and support from multiple department heads.
Sales and marketing analytics
Sales and marketing analytics (likely performed on the data gathered from the data mining initiative) transforms information into useful, easily understandable, and actionable reports that will bolster your customer relationship management initiative. Using this data, it becomes possible to do two things: analyze trends from a broad perspective, such as what type of products customers tend to prefer in each geographical area; and analyze trends from a more granular, customer-specific perspective. The latter point would allow a call agent, for example, to see analytics reports while talking to a customer, and get a good idea of what product they would be most likely to purchase.
Case and lead management
Case management applications allow the call center or the customer-facing employee to easily track customer interactions, so that all transactions and calls can be referred to at a later date by any other call agent. Ideally, this track record would be immediately visible at the point of customer contact for easy reference. Lead management too, is an integral part of CRM, and used by the sales staff to track sales leads and referrals; ideally this is also integrated with other customer-facing employees who may from time to time encounter referral opportunities to pass onto the sales staff.
Email
Email is so simple and ubiquitous that it is easily forgotten as a major part of CRM. Email is the heart of many marketing initiatives, and a good email marketing campaign can generate a tremendous number of leads for the sales staff. Email is also used in many other CRM-related initiatives, for things like email newsletters that keep customers up to date on the latest developments, and of course, as a primary means of two-way communication between customer and company.
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