CRM Best Practices for CEM
Posted by Brian Koma on Fri, Oct 09, 2009
According to the Vovici CE IQ study, organizations that have the most loyal customers make sophisticated use of their Customer Relationship Management systems.
Nothing undermines loyalty of your customers more than when your organization demonstrates that it doesn't know who your customers are, what they have bought or how they have recently interacted with you. Too often survey authors ask customers to provide basic details about themselves rather than crossreference that information from a CRM system.
By associating known information about the customer - such as name, company name, product/service history, support interactions and other relevant data - with requests for unknown transactional, attitudinal or experiential data, organizations can engender much higher degrees of customer loyalty. This approach achieves two ends: First, it shows customers that you're treating them as individuals and not as numbers; second, it allows organizations to ask fewer questions but get better data. By no longer needing to ask customers to provide answers to questions which you already have answers to in a CRM system, it's possible to ask fewer questions but get better data by further reducing feedback fatigue. How valuable was this practice? With a 0.57 loyalty correlation, it was second only to having a strategic commitment to customer experience management.
Sadly, many organizations have not yet standardized on a single CRM system across the organization, and those that have fail to integrate other applications with the CRM system where appropriate, enshrining the CRM system as the central data repository for customer information.
Only by appending CRM data to attitudinal information can organizations build a complete 360 degree view of their customer and their customer's experience with the organization. These four practices truly leverage CRM to build customer loyalty.