10 May Could Business Growth Through “Customer Management”
When aiming for business growth, such as, increasing sales or expanding market share, applying the idea of CRM is currently becoming a standard practice.
However, there are many people who understand CRM as only “customer management” and cases where the true benefit of CRM was missed out could be seen now and then. Here, what kind of results should be anticipated from CRM and how to realize those results will be explained.
Will the business grow buy only introducing CRM?
CRM could be directedly translated to “the management of customer relations”
Do you know that CRM policy is also a method which uses segmentation marketing to separate customer into categories? One representative example of this policy is the market automation function.
Due to the widespread of internet, customers are currently receiving much more information than they could receive from visiting salesperson. If existing customers are left unattended, they could go to other companies easily.
Therefore it is important to manage relationship with the customer and increase the satisfaction in order to keep existing customers. In addition, customer’s needs also diversified, and grasping those are also necessary.
Since market automation is a tool to automate high precision marketing tasks and improve the efficiency, such as, analysis of customer action history or customer information management, the automation of mail marketing, management of important actions for lead nurturing, reporting functions, etc., There is a tendency to misunderstood that carry out this marketing automation itself is CRM.
However, even though CRM is the management of customer relations, is that actually all there is to it? Let’s rethink from the beginning about why CRM is necessary?
Why is CRM necessary?
In order to think about the importance of CRM, lets start from the difference between Sale and Sales.
Both words means the selling of products or services, however, selling and conducting sales differ largely.
“The difference between sale and sales is, simply put, the difference between “selling a product” and “selling a service”. Sale is for customers who is looking for simply a “product”, while sales is for customers who are looking for some kind of “services” such as attachment or convenience. Of course, a person could be either one or both types of customer.
When a customer is looking for a “service”, in order to provide the most ideal “service”, it is without doubt that the company(salesperson) must build a relationship with the customer to understand what kind of “service” the customer is actually looking for.
In another word, it can be said that Sale should be specialized for selling of a “product” through Sale management, while Sales should be specialized in customer relationship management through customer management.
Therefore, for a company which has sales as the main axis, the idea of CRM which enables customer management is necessary. Through CRM, the number of times that a customer could bring profit to the company could be increased, this is called the Customer Lifetime Value(CLV), which is one result that could be anticipated from CRM.
Moreover, improving CLV is actually the biggest issue for any company, this is partly because the widespread of the idea of CRM. However, in order to aim for business growth, increasing the CLV of the customer with high CLV further is important. In another word, the ideal scenario is for the customer to refer a different customer, the size of the value which makes these customers wants to refer is called Customer Recommended Referral Value(CRM).
Even though both CLV and CRV are results that could be anticipated from CRM, at present, there are actually many companies implementing CRM strategy which focus only on increasing CLV.
So, what kind of CRM strategies which increases CRM are there?
What is the CRM strategy which increases CLV and CRV?
A case study of a CRM strategy implementation which does not only increase CLV, but also increases CRV will be introduced.
Do you know of the service “Jagarikou” developed by Calbee Co., Ltd.?
The details of the service will not be mentioned but the important point is that the customer could participate in product development.
The benchmark point as a CRM strategy is that through this service, the customer’s attachment towards the product “Jagariko” is increased (=increased CLV), and there is a setting which makes people wants to promote the product they developed themselves to their acquaintances (= increased CRV).
Summary
Nowadays, any company talks about the importance of CRM in the expanding of sales and promoting company growth, however, the important point is whether a strategy capable of increasing both CLV and CRV is devised.
Among the companies, those which succeeded in CRM strategy through creating a customer network became benchmarks. However, it could be said that approaching the issue of “how to create a unique CRM strategy for the company?” from the perspective of increasing CLV and CRV is important.
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