CRM (Customer Relationship Management), the customer relationship management system, is becoming a hot selling point in the enterprise management software market. Why has CRM quickly stood out among the ever-emerging management concepts and new terminologies, gaining attention and promotion from various parties? Because the application of CRM directly relates to an enterprise's sales performance. It can re-integrate the enterprise's user information resources, making the originally "independent" salespeople, marketing personnel, telephone service staff, after-sales repair personnel, etc., begin to truly coordinate and cooperate, forming a powerful team centered around "meeting customer needs." The implementation results of CRM can withstand detection by "hard indicators" such as sales volume, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and market share. The added value it brings to the enterprise is tangible. Therefore, the popularity of CRM is not just media hype about "another" new term; rather, it will indeed change the sales culture of enterprises, allowing every member of the enterprise to personally feel the opportunities and challenges brought by the information age.
What is CRM?
Every modern enterprise has already realized the importance of customers. Establishing friendly relationships with customers can be said to relate to the survival and success of enterprises. However, in traditional enterprise structures, it is not easy to truly establish continuous, friendly personalized connections with customers. The reason is simple - technical limitations prevent it, and conceptually it is unimaginable. For example, after-sales repairs have time and location restrictions, making it difficult to provide 24-hour instant service; or a certain customer's purchasing preferences are only known by a single salesperson, and may not get the most satisfactory choices when passed on to other marketing or after-sales service personnel; some basic customer information needs to be repeatedly processed in different departments, even leading to data loss. More importantly, salespeople often only focus on completing sales quotas, lacking communication with back-office support personnel during the sales process, causing customers to find that the services and product performance do not match what was initially described by the salesperson, thus feeling deceived. These common "enterprise diseases" all stem from the enterprise's operational processes not being designed and implemented according to the principle of "customer-centric," but rather each department acting independently based on its own interests, which, although possibly winning orders in the short term, damages long-term cooperative relationships with customers, requiring the enterprise to spend a great deal of time and money to repair them later.
The added value of CRM to enterprises mainly manifests in two aspects:
(1) Through the integration of user information resources, achieving resource sharing throughout the entire company, thereby providing faster and more thoughtful quality services to customers, attracting and retaining more customers;
(2) Through the redesign of business processes, managing customer relationships more effectively, reducing enterprise costs. Therefore, successful CRM implementation involves both system resources and corporate culture. Only when both aspects are satisfied simultaneously can the goal of increasing enterprise profits and improving customer relationships, this optimal investment effect, be achieved.
In our past ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) implementations, we found that the fundamental factor determining the success or failure of ERP implementation is whether the enterprise's business process reengineering BPR (Business Process Reengineering) is coordinated with the information system. This valuable experience can also be applied to CRM implementation. If the business process cannot be matched with the use of the information system, it will be difficult to realize the value of information resources, and often lead the enterprise's investment into a "black hole" where there is no return.
What kind of corporate culture matches with CRM?
Although CRM implementation is formally manifested as a combination, debugging, installation, testing, and operation of some software packages, at the core of information management lies a new type of concept. If we draw a flowchart for a traditional enterprise, especially a manufacturing enterprise, it is not hard to find that these organizations are all centered around product production. Each product model corresponds to a set of multi-stage unidirectional processes from raw material purchase, processing, assembly, inventory to sales and repair. Therefore, the entire enterprise's sales strategy is "push"-oriented. Sales promotion, sales promotion, if there is no need to rely on large amounts of advertising, and no pressure from inventory product accumulation, why would sales constantly push outward? In the past, this kind of enterprise process could meet the survival and development needs of companies because, in most cases, customers did not have enough information for selection, especially in sunrise industries, where customers basically followed the innovation rhythm of enterprises, continuously upgrading and replacing products. Therefore, this "sales promotion" and the matching "mass marketing" (mass marketing) were still effective business strategies.
But now, customers are increasingly exercising their self-selection rights and are increasingly less influenced by mass media. Even in high-tech industries, potential customers are sitting at home less and waiting for others to deliver brochures to make purchase decisions based solely on who has louder advertisements. Taking computer sales as an example, old-established computer manufacturers like IBM and Compaq already had scale effects, and it was usually difficult for emerging companies like Dell to compete with them in terms of price and sales channels. However, Dell not only took away a certain market share from large computer manufacturers but also made a remarkable impression in the emerging online sales area. This was largely because, after users understood the computer product, they could completely decide what kind of host and accessories to buy based on their own needs by simply making a phone call or using the network. This gave small companies providing personalized services the possibility to reduce costs and allow customers to configure and choose themselves. This is just a well-known example.
When customers understand more about products, the "push" of sales promotion becomes increasingly powerless. "Mass marketing" may even end up doing "weddings for others." Companies spending money on new product advertisements do not necessarily receive orders because they merely introduce new products, while customers may look for other suppliers that better meet their specific needs. Therefore, when users have enough information, sales shift from the supplier's "push" to the client's active "pull." That is to say, when customers tentatively contact the company's marketing or sales personnel, they likely already have a rough idea of the products and services they need and have determined their budget. Instead of spending large sums on expensive advertisements and sending out a large amount of promotional materials without targeting, it is better to seize the "pull" signal actively issued by the customer. If the company's salespeople can timely detect the demands of this potential customer and provide more targeted products and services based on this information, they can accurately capture the customer's heart and develop them into loyal "repeat customers." Due to the rapid development of the Internet and various communication technologies, the cost required for this large-scale continuous "one-on-one" customer contact is drastically decreasing. If we compare the expenses of mass marketing averaged per new customer, we can find that the "pull" method is more efficient and yields more satisfactory results. The effectiveness of CRM is precisely reflected in this way.