Intelligent Bombardment - Need of Hour !

"What an Idea" - My cellular connection goes with this tagline. Definitely quite satisfied with the services and offerings provided by them in this crazy Indian telecom market and been quite loyal to them from past many years. It became the first Indian telco to go for Siebel CRM solutions some time back. But then when I think of the CRM intelligence, I think that should be the main motive of these organisations, without haphazardly targeting customers unlimited times for some offereings they might not go for.. .like you can say years down the line!

In the article Recession Cry & CRM, I talked about sticking to the principles and seein that the customer doesn't feel too bombarded. CRM systems wont fulfill the purpose and it may be waste of money definitely targeting the wrong audience. Businesses have to ensure that money spent is wisely used so as to actually reap the benefits from the messages that are communicated to the customers.

Siebel and many other CRM systems have the capability to deliver multi stage campaigns with recurring campaigns being one of those, others being event triggered and response triggered. From a marketer's perspective it becomes important to target the new/loyal customers with the new offereings, but then that comes at a price! Intelligent bombarding plays an important role in this when you actually know a particular lead will turn out into an opportunity, but if it doesnt solve the purpose, its waste of money and time also.

From the customers perspective, it becomes quite an irritating experience and the brand loyalty that he/she may have is tend to decline over a period of time and who knows what the next step may be! Recurring campaigns will definitely involve not much thinking behind and you let the system do the job for you. But system will be a system ultimately. Companies need to understand that repeated communication of no value for the customer is not doing any good for the company. You need to keep it simple at times! Look back at the strategy and terminate the campaigns for those particular customers - Chucking Customers is also an interesting topic to be discussed at in the CRM arena..!

The marketer needs to understand this and strategise accordingly. There may be a different school of thought here where in one can say that I have decided that my business goes with 5-6 repeated communication. But with the experience we face some times, its like it goes on and on! And then u think back ?? Is someone really paying some attention to whats going on ??

This calls for making intelligent use of CRM Analytics and one needs to understand that intelligent marketing has a profound impact on customer retention and growth. Align the communcations to the business processes in order to create a more comprehensive picture of the customer’s behaviour in relation to the company and harness the benefits of Intelligent Bombarding!

Mads@CRM

Gartner predicts future of CRM

Enters Gartner - Future of CRM

My previous article Recession Cry & CRM helped me to dive further into the topic & I would certainly like to refer to Gartner Predictions for CRM -

Some snippets from the article -

• The business goals and challenges of customer relationship management (CRM) programmes will remain the same today as they were 10 years ago, and they will continue to predominate during the next 10 years, according to Gartner, Inc.
• CRM remains a major focus for business executives, because the goals of acquiring, developing and retaining customers in a profitable manner are timeless, said Ed Thompson, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. CRM remained a top priority for CIOs in Europe who ranked CRM their No. 5 business priority in 2009.
• CRM application pricing has changed dramatically during the past 10 years, with organisations commonly paying $1,000 to $1,500 per licensed user in 2009 compared with over $3,000 at its peak in 2000. The most common pricing model is still per user, but process-based pricing, fuelled by service-oriented architecture (SOA) and software as a service (SaaS) will become commonplace by 2020, up from less than 1 percent of the time in 2009.
• Since 2000 the biggest change to technology-enabled CRM projects came with offshore external service providers. The shift to using offshore external resources for deploying CRM applications has reduced implementation costs, in most cases. More than 80 percent of CRM application implementations in the US and UK involve some form of offshore resource. Yet, in countries such as France, Germany and Japan, this figure is less than 5 percent. During the next decade, the use of offshore resources for these types of CRM projects will steadily rise as international competitive pressure increases, and the suppliers become more available.
• The worldwide CRM application software market grew at a rate of nearly 90 percent in 2000 then collapsed in 2001 bottoming out in late 2003. Since 2004, the market has grown steadily, at 11 percent to 23 percent per year.It is set for 10 percent growth from 2007 to 2012, despite the recession in2009 and knock-on in 2010. Gartner estimates that total revenue for CRM application software market in 2008 amounted to nearly $9 billion worldwide and will reach $10 billion in 2009, a 7 percent percent year-on-year increase. This includes licenses, maintenance and subscription revenues.
• Over the next decade, organisations are going to experience a shift in CRM applications, with the rise of social CRM. The ratio of operational CRM, analytical CRM and social CRM in packaged applications will shift from 90:9:1 in 2009 to 70:20:10 by the year 2020

Mads@CRM

Recession Cry & CRM

Recession has taken its toll on everyone and its tough time for all individuals and organizations battling IT! IT investments have been hit hard and companies are looking to reduce bucks spend in IT. It’s interesting to see how CRM battles out it’s strengths in this Survival of Fittest battlefield. How does CRM fit itself in this? Will companies compromise on IT infrastructure costs or on implementing Enterprise Packages like CRM! Given the fact that both of them have their own purposes, but still given a thought it becomes much more interesting to position these on the battlefield.

Question for the business honchos is definitely maximizing their resources and options @ hand. Truly, it has been ther forever (Has it really been??), but now in the time of recession it gets the limelight over all other matters. All companies have restructured their way of working, honchos are talking about extra efforts from their employees and no time littering. Each buck spend needs to be now valued! Thankfully to Recession!

CRM strategies have always been the favorite for customer focused organizations and CRM propositions have always been questioned at! But CRM investments have always acted as and will acts as a long term benefit for the companies to have a valuable relationship with both the current and prospective customers. Even organisations planning for new CRM implementations won’t have a problem with the CRM investments, provided that they have an accurate and efficient approach towards it.

I truly agree with some of the CRM gurus that CRM becomes more important during recession because during glorious times of the economy, organisations tend to take the existing customers for granted and become a bit sloppier about managing leads. When economy crashes down, these same organisations look at their customers in all together different manner and these bunch of customers are in for a royal treat. Customer Delight becomes much more important cos we don’t want the competitor to eat out your share!

You have to hold on to ur Cheese pie in this rat race before the business mutters out Who Moved My Cheese???

In these turbulent times, CRM systems go a long way in achieving the good ol’ saying “In an economic storm, hang on to your most valuable customers” with the offerings it has in terms of Marketing Automation (Campaign Management) , Sales Force Automation, excellent Analytics offerings, new age theories like Closed Loop Marketing etc.

CRM definitely will nurture the relationships with the set of customers they have (remember Jerry Maguire). Just stick to the principles - It should not be that the customer feels too bombarded or it should not be that the companies are spending bucks targeting the wrong audience.

Regards,
Mads@CRM

Entering t Mad's CRM World

Hi CRM World !

I hav been a lot into reading blogs and articles on CRM these days and it really inspired me to be a part of this tech savvy CRM community. Thinking on the lines of the power of technology/CRM and the way businesses are shaping their processes in tune with CRM, it really makes one wonder, Oh ! Even this is possible?!?

Enter the CRM Space today and immediately u will be hit by the big bang theories of CRM 2.0, Cloud Computing, CRM in Recession, Magic Quadrants, Hype Cycle's for CRM and the list goes on!

Hoping to contribute my best in this Maddening (Atleast to t layman!) CRM World

Regards,
Mads@CRM