What is CRM?

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time.

When implemented correctly, CRM allows a company to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and up selling opportunities to building targeted marketing programs aimed at both acquiring and/or retaining clients.

Once thought of as a type of software, CRM has evolved into a customer-centric philosophy that must permeate an entire organization. There are three key elements to a successful CRM initiative, namely: people, process, and technology.

The people throughout a company-from the CEO to each and every customer service rep-need to buy in to and support CRM. A company's business processes must be reengineered to bolster its CRM initiative, often from the view of: How can this process better serve the customer?

Firms must select the right technology to drive these improved processes, provide the best data to the employees, and be easy enough to operate that users won't balk. If one of these three foundations is not sound, the entire CRM structure will crumble.

Above all, CRM is a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. Ultimately, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.

If customer relationships are the heart of business success, then CRM is the valve the pumps a company's life blood. As such, CRM is best suited to help businesses use people, processes, and technology to gain insight into the behavior and value of customers. This insight allows for improved customer service, increased call center efficiency, added cross-sell and up sell opportunities, improved close rates, streamlined sales and marketing processes, improved customer profiling and targeting, reduced costs, and increased share of customer and overall profitability.

Whether you are looking for information on Customer Service, Systems Integration, Sales & Marketing Automation, or case studies on your particular industry, we hope you find these topics a useful resource.

Web 2.0

There are a range of definitions that define the new Internet, version 2.0. Without a doubt, the Web has moved into a totally new phase when compared to its early beginnings over 20 years ago. In the early years, having an e-mail account first started as a curiosity, then moved to become a standard, and now has become a necessity. For marketers, the development of the Internet signaled a new group of potential consumers; email account owners who were a click away from a sales or marketing campaign. The difficult part has been and continues to surround the concept of securing that “click”.

Today’s direct marketers are faced with the challenge of sending their clients and prospects direct mailings and thereby establishing a “hook” for continuing interaction before the recipient makes the fatal decision of refusing the inbound mail as “spam’ or even worse, “unsubscribing” to the mailing list.

Today’s new Internet technologies allow online users to speak poorly about service of whatever online nature (a trend that even the best lawyers from the world’s best companies cannot avoid); or promote a product without expecting a dime for the publicity. By and large, the social networks, in particular YouTube, Blogger and MySpace have become the great protagonists of the New Age. The new challenge for direct marketers is to understand how these new media portals can benefit a company and, at the same time realize how to coordinate this trend with conventional marketing techniques. The ultimate objective it would seem would be to create a single sales and marketing strategy that incorporates both sides of the equation.

It goes without saying that none of the social networks of the world will ignore the enormous potential that they have regarding online users, and the database information that they own. This repository most often includes information about an individual user’s likes and dislikes, what he or she would like to own or what his or her pocketbook can afford him or her to buy. YouTube is an excellent example of the immensely popular media concept of online social networking, which today is a repository of over 45 Terabytes of information (videos, content, etc.). This portal continues to attract new users of all backgrounds at a high 20% month-over-month growth rate. Take for example YouTube visitor Matt Harding who came up with the funny idea of recording videos of himself dancing in different parts of the world. So, when Harding was at the point of canceling his email account due to the huge amount of fans contacting him, the Stride gum company decided to contact him directly to offer him sponsorship to cover the costs of additional trips around the world to support his dancing video concept. To this day, Harding continues to produce dance videos with Stride gum as his sponsor.

Not only is this phenomenon taking place in the US, but in parts of Latin America. For example, Edgar, a precocious adolescent from the Northern part of Mexico is caught on film falling into a river. To share the experience with others, the young boy decided to upload the video to YouTube. After 6 million clicks and counting, the rest is history on Edgar’s quick rise to social networking fame. In short, Edgar traveled throughout Mexico to delivering special presentations of his video escapade with nothing more to offer than uttering the same lines in the video, namely “¡Ya güey!” (which roughly translates into English as the colloquial “Hey man” or “Hey dude!”). Today, thanks to a corporate sponsorship by the large bread manufacturer Gamesa, Edgar is now the spokesperson for their “Emperador” line of cookies. The original video has been modified to include this corporate sponsorship connection. Over 6 million visits have been recorded to the Gamesa sponsored video.

But what we call Web 2.0 is much more than social networking. It is a new place in a new time where users can interact with each other at a dizzying pace; a place where one can find enormous amounts of content and cross references in split seconds; where the concept of “Author’s rights” continues to evolve. More than ever before, the new Web is place where one can reach a large audience of new and potential clients very quickly with a minimal outlay of cash and investment when compared to conventional advertising and promotion such as radio or TV.

Without a doubt, today’s Web comes in a variety of flavors, appealing to a wide range of audiences, offering marketers new and exciting ways of reaching their target consumers. In our next blog we will further explore social networking success stories and how marketers are cashing in on the trend. Stay tuned for our next issue.