If your customer is king, how would you manage your relationship with him?

First consider the focus on your customer. What does your customer value most in the service you offer? Is your organization’s unique selling point based on a “personal service”? Can you identify and define your customer’s buying behavior, his values and his motivation factors? Can you identify the shopping route your customer takes?

Then consider how your organization can best respond to customer demands. Identify and prioritize aspects that need immediate and continuous change to remain competitive while maintaining customer loyalty. How can you respond fast to fulfill your customer expectations?

Your Customer Relations Management Strategy should be based on monitoring and converging these two; the customer needs and organization’s response; to exceed customer expectations and retain customer loyalty. Your organization’s IT strategy should be based around the question “how can IT be best planned and implemented to fulfill your CRM strategy?”

In my own experience, both in the public and private sector in Europe and US, CRM has been effectively used only by a handful of leading progressive organizations who are able to effectively integrate IT to CRM with innovative thinking.

With $470billion spent globally and $250billion spent in the US on promotions, organizations cannot waste money on not productive, untargeted advertising. IT when used to manage, identify and focus on the customer needs should bring measurable, tangible benefits. Corporate Leaders should not be afraid to ask the question “what is the ROI on my IT and promotional investment?”

Most organizations simply disregard the value of customer information. Where they live, what they buy, who decides, what do they read, what influences them and what they value. An IT based CRM solution should combine an information system for data mining to target “best value” customers as well as to help the organization to best help to serve and keep the valued customer.

The system you implement should be flexible and adaptable to changing customer and corporate needs. However, what we have seen in a majority of cases is the organization expecting the customer to adapt to software restrictions. This stifles creativity, undermines customer loyalty and restricts corporate growth.

CRM should not start at the point of computerization. If your current thinking on customer relationship and management is a mess and confusion, computerization would simply give you “a computerized mess”. CRM should be part of your corporate strategy and IT should be a tool to implement.

If it costs you a $100 to get each new good customer, it would cost you $20 to keep him. What would be the cost if you lose him?