Implementing CRM strategies in your organisation

As addressed in the previous blog article,Customer Loyalty and Best Practices used in Sri Lanka,  CRM  – Customer Relationship Management refers to managing the relationships with your customers.

Since maintaining customers and improving their loyalty is highly beneficial, most companies implement  CRM strategies within their business and marketing plan. Here are some basic steps by which you can do to implement CRM strategies in your organisation.

§  Grow and Nurture a Customer Oriented Culture – Every single employee in the organisation, be in a front-office person, a salesperson or a production officer, must understand understand the value a customer brings to the organisation… This drives a customer oriented workplace and workforce, delivering better customer sales, and products that are better serving of  customers’ requirements.

§  Gather  customer information – CRM involves many customer nurturing initiatives, which means that it is important to keep in touch with customers and keep track of some of the basic customer information. For this purpose, it is best to acquire basic contact information from customers at the point of purchase. This could be done by;

§  Requesting customers to fill a form with their telephone numbers and email addresses,

§  Ask to opt-in to newsletters or promotional SMS messages.

§  Direct them to the website/social media pages of the company and encourage them to comment, engage and review the products/services.

§  Use a CRM system to store customer data – A CRM tool can be as simple as an excel document or as complex as an integrated CRM tool such as Salesforce.

1.     CRM data can be stored in excel or other spreadsheet software, using columns for various fields, and can be used at different instances, for example, when performing an email campaign, the email addresses and the names can be extracted. Although this seems basic, this is still a popular methodology adopted by several small companies and is successful in serving its purpose at no cost.

2.     There are also a number of CRM tools that can be used for this purpose. Some such tools are web based and available online. They allow features such as Sales Tracking, Social Media Integration, Improving Productivity and Sales Force Automation. This is very useful in the short as well as long run, improving productivity and speed, allowing categorization of leads, and easy import and export options. Some examples for such systems are Zoho CRM, Sugar CRM,Salesforce CRM etc.

§  Use customer information to build relationship – Once basic customer information is obtained, the company should attempt to communicate and form a relationship.  Some strategies that companies use for this were explained in our blog article Customer Loyalty and Best Practices used in Sri Lanka The customers could be further directed to the website social media pages of the company and asked to comment, engage and review the products/services, submit testimonials etc., wherein they become brand ambassadors

Adopting CRM strategies will further assist the company to identify and create customer target groups based on lifetime value, and future value brought to the organisation.

Created: April 1st, 2014