Customer Relationship Management - Part 1

Introduction

Customer relationship management was a 2001/02 buzz term that many businesses read about, thought it was great but didn't really know how to use their web presence as leverage to achieve leadership positions. Well in this set of articles I'll be tackling practical web integration of customer relationship management.

It's true that businesses that have a customer centric approach have reaped the benefits of their websites. A customer centric approach is the first step to understanding how the web can be used to help manage customer relationships. For what the Internet provides is a mechanism to provide an ongoing dialogue, which is used to understand the customer.

Michael Treacy & Frederick D. Wiersema in the mid 90's outlined 3 strategies or "value disciplines" of business success:

• Product/Service - product/service performance or uniqueness;
• Operational excellence - no hassle, speedy service or lost cost; and
• Customer intimacy - personalised service, commitment to total solution.

In the days before the Internet, excelling in one of these disciplines assured success. However, with the advent of immediate business and online competition the successful business must excel at all three. Although all three impact on the total user experience, for the most part this article focuses on "customer intimacy".

The Total User Experience

So what is "the total user experience"? The user experience is the collective actions, reactions, feeling and results that a customer has with a company. Customer contact points are the times that customers interact with a business, and these tend to but not always follow the "consumer decision process":

Process Step	Business action/reaction
Plan a purchase of a product or service	Provide product/service information when and where the consumer expects to find that information. Respond to enquiries.
Evaluate choices	Provide references, portfolio, price performance indicators and comparisons
Shops around	Engage sales channels, offers and promotions, discounts and dynamic pricing
Purchasing	Confirm price and delivery, order tracking
Uses product	Technical support, help desk, documentation and supplies
Post purchase evaluation	Satisfaction survey, updates service renewal, technical news, up sell promotions, add-on sales
Disposal	trade up offers, disposal services, roll over management

In a large business deals with consumers through intermediaries or customer contact points are spread through several department offering a consistent total user experience is difficult. however, centralised database systems and Internet technologies have made the the task a little easier. Through a website and its related databases all customer facing activities can be provided.