The objective? Leverage information about customers to build a personal relationship with them, formulate better customer retention strategies and more importantly, drive marketing.
Sure, companies can achieve this with the help of a good CRM system. But for the CRM solution to work effectively, companies need to pull together vast amounts of data about customers, their preferences and their transactions into a data warehouse that call center operators can access while attending to customers. Populating the data warehouse is therefore critical.
However, most companies find capturing customer data or feedback the most difficult part of implementing their CRM strategy.
Why is data needed?
Customer data can be collected at various levels: at the point of sale and during various interactions between the customer and company representatives. It can be collected through various channels--call centers, feedback from Web sites, contacts by salespeople or the customers' visits to various retail and wholesale operations.
Typically, populating a data warehouse involves undertaking a data audit to identify where customer records are held as well as their condition and accuracy. This data needs to be extracted from legacy systems, standardised, rationalised (for example, identifying duplicates) and consolidated before being loaded into a data warehouse.
Once in the data warehouse, company representatives can centrally access data to instantly update a customer about the status of a shipment or ensure that he or she receives mailings, calls, email or Web site advertising tailored according to preference.
Companies can analyse the data collected to make inferences about what customers want and cross-sell initiatives. They can also use the data to find out who are their more profitable customers and who aren't. A good CRM system alone can use this data, along with information on employee workloads and the cost of providing various services to maximise company resources.
Play video
There are currently no comments for this post.