MUSCAT: Three students of SQU, Razan al Rawas, Al Zahra al Ghattami and Marwa al Nofli, under the supervision of Dr Ali Tarhini, Department of Information Systems, Sultan Qaboos University, have brought out a report on Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Businesses success in different specialisations and majors now are depending on the strong relationship between the organisation and customer, that will lead us to a technology system call (CRM approach). The question now is what does CRM represents and how organisations apply it? What are the benefits that both organisations and customers gain by using CRM?
The report says the CRM approach is not a modern idea that just comes up. Unfortunately it was not using industriously earlier. Customer relationship management (CRM) has been defined as the management approach that involves interacting, identifying, attracting, developing and maintaining successful customer relationships with the organization over time in order to increase retention of profitable and driving sales growth.
The modern technology system approach related to CRM which organisations use now is CRM 2.0. It is customer engagement strategy supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. For example social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook lays more stress on customers participation and collaboration.
The way organiations apply the CRM is by following business strategy. Businesses can gain a competitive advantage through CRM. How is this achieved. Through customer satisfaction of customer needs (as with market orientation). So companies need to create business strategies to gain competitive advantage through customer satisfaction.
This is summarised in three major key areas:
Customer Acquisition: This is the process of attracting the customer for their first purchase. Businesses can increase the number of customers that purchase from them for the first time through market orientation, innovative IT and value creation.
Customer Retention: concept is customer returns to them and buys for a second time by keeping them as a customer. So they aim to increase the number of customers that purchase from them regularly
Customer Extension: These are additional, supplementary purchases. The goal is to retain them as customers for the extended products or services. The strategy is to increase the number of customers that purchase additional or supplementary products and services.
Customer relationship management system (CRM) has significant benefits for both organisations and customers. These are improved customer relations one of the benefits of using a CRM is making better customer satisfaction.
This strategy, all dealings involving servicing, marketing, and selling your products to your customers can be done in an organised and systematic way. One can provide better services to customers through enhanced understanding of their issues and this in turn helps in expanding customer loyalty and decreasing customer agitation.
Also, you can gain a continued feedback from your customers regarding your products and services.
Additionally, it is possible that your customers prescribe you to the people, when you provide efficient and satisfactory services. Increase customer revenues using CRM will increase the revenue of the company greatly. Data collective is an effective way to popularise marketing campaigns. Those promotion and different new customers and ease purchasing of your product would increase your customer revenue.
Maximise upselling and cross-selling are techniques that target your current customer base your customer will trust the salesperson’s suggestions if they have had positive past experiences with purchases from that salesperson.
This will help to build a stronger relationship with customers and build customer loyalty. Better internal communication lead to both higher employee and customer satisfaction.
This helps to make internal communication easier by tracking and making it accessible to all employees who need it in a centralised location. Optimise marketing use of the system to make your marketing efforts more effective by monitoring your performance. Also refine the segmentation and tune your messaging.
By Razan al Rawas, Al Zahra al Ghattami, Marwa al Nofli, Sultan Qaboos University.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
