In the world of nowadays the most successful businesses are built on the excellent relationship with the customers. Client oriented businesses prove to be the most popular and the strongest competitors in their markets. The biggest and most renowned business awards of Europe, America and Australia consider the companies’ customer focus as one of the most important criteria for business evaluation.
In order to for companies to create the best relationship with their customers, achieve high loyalty and earn new clients it is not enough to just be polite with. Businesses of all kinds employ experts to work out special techniques and strategies helping them to work specifically with their client base, fulfill and predict the needs of their customers, provide the best customer care, and promote the services for the new customers.
In the contemporary world where every market field is filled with competitors fighting for the customers it is very hard to have high loyalty and save the reputation of a high quality business. Only the most flexible and constantly developing companies manage to stay on top and remain popular in the rapidly changing world of business and trades.
Customer relationship management is gaining its popularity on the contemporary business arena. Many modern companies started to employ customer relationship specialists to heighten the revenues, create opportunities for targeted marketing and achieve highly effective customer focus and client loyalty. Customer relationship management is a diverse field; it includes multiple strategies, models and programs.
Customer relationship management also known as CRM is based on the processes the companies use to achieve better organization of their contacts and connect them with the current and future customers. CRM works through widening customer knowledge and providing customer retention. Customer knowledge includes various aspects such as personal information about the clients, their names, locations, preferences, age and gender.
Basically, client knowledge should be based on whichever features of the customers are the most important for the company’s business. The better knowledge the company possesses, the more qualified services it is capable of providing. Customer knowledge provides the businesses with opportunities of approaching the clients and working out the best strategies to fulfill their current and projected needs.
Besides, customer knowledge contains customer history, it allows forming customer databases, analyze them to get a better idea of the kinds of services that could be launched or improved. To accumulate this information the companies participate in mutual communication with the clients by means of phone calls, fax, questionnaires, emails, and website forums. Customer feedback is highly important for the successful customer relationship management.
This is why responses, complaints and advice of the customers should be regularly monitored and analyzed. Statistically, the majority of contemporary businesses tend to lose at least ten per cent of their customers every year. This happens due to the lack or flaws of customer relationship management.
In order to present the customers with the best services the managers of any business need to develop a capacity to view their company and its products and services from the perspective of the customers. CRM works though employees, technology and process. Its main focus is the retention of customers; additionally, it serves to attract new clients. CRM strategies are designed to individualize the relationships between companies and their customers.
One of the world’s best users of customer relationship management is the company called Vodafone. This company was founded in 1994, it works within Mobile Telecommunications industry and focuses on providing mobile networks and telecom services. At the moment the company has about ten thousand employees. Vodafone currently operates in twenty five countries and is the world’s leading international mobile communications company.
Vodafone constantly works n improvement of their customer services and relationships. Recently they successfully launched their new contacts manager. This project’s focus is to replace four contacts management systems, which were employed before, with one manager carrying out the combined functions. This project is called the new CRM or NCRM (Vodafone, par. 2).
Its main goals are to increase the customer satisfaction, create a single and easy tool managing information, improve and promote the company’s image and decrease the time it takes various departments to process various requests and services. NCRM is now installed in all the Vodafone call centers. This new system created satisfaction among the customer managers and as a result, improved he customer relationships.
The benefits Vodafone gained from the installation of NCRM are the faster response to requests and complaints due to the unified contact database and management of client contacts, improved customer knowledge, better handling and report of production indicators and quicker and more successful evolution of the system. Vodafone contacts its customers through fax, mail, phone, internet, email, face to face, this way it created a three hundred and sixty degree customer view and service oriented architecture.
Vodafone approaches each of their customers individually and provides them with services, advice, clarifications and help whenever needed. The advertisements employed by Vodafone also demonstrate their customer orientation.
One of the negative aspects of Vodafone’s CRM is its excessive thoroughness expressed through frequent phone calls to the customers with irrelevant offers and multiple questions. It is suggested that Vodafone employs instant messages or emails to recommend their offers or inform the customers about bill payment.
Another interesting example of CRM employment and utilization is Lush Cosmetics, a well known international hair, skin and body cosmetic provider. Lush is a UK based company, it was founded in 1994. The company manufactures and retails hand-made cosmetics. Lush is environmentally friendly and always emphasizes that none of its products were tested on animals. The company currently operates retail specialty stores in over forty five countries.
Lush stands out among all the other cosmetic providers because of its unique approach to their customer relationship management. First of all, Lush has worked out their individual presentation style that works through the involvement of the emotional side (Dibeehi, par. 1). Their propositions and advertisements are built in a way where sales are not emphasized. Instead Lush provides tips, advice and instructions about their products, research, strategies and findings.
Lush advertises by means of education and information. This always leaves the customer feeling special and individually approach. Lush speaks to its clients as if to good friends quickly removing all the communication barriers and establishing joyful and relaxed atmosphere.
Lush is also very constant and focused when it comes to the customer relationship management. Lush managers earn their customer loyalty by providing unique products, having a system of notifications and announcements about the freshly made batches of cosmetics and constantly widening the range of their production so that clients are always intrigued by innovations.
Another company that successfully utilizes customer relationship management is American Express. It is a world renowned multinational corporation managing financial services. This company was founded in 1850. Today it is one of the largest card issuers in the world that operated over one hundred and two million cards. American Express operates in one hundred and thirty countries and has over sixty three thousand employees all over the world.
The company is innovation oriented; it is known to have a special social proposition channel where various concepts and ideas are posted. The channel is transparent, the visitors can vote for the best ideas and then the managers collect that data and process it. American Express has recently released several products that were inspired by the propositions from the company’s social channel.
This is an excellent way to demonstrate the company’s attentive monitoring of the social opinion and flexibility towards the desires of the users and employees. Over the last two years seven of such products saw the world. Besides, the company has its Relatinship Care service, which helps the employees learn more about the behaviors and preferences of their customers to make better and more individual recommendations (Krishnan, par. 7).
American Express currently works on ways of engaging its customers into the creative process, so basically anyone with a worthy idea could participate in the innovation process of the corporation. Such approach would raise the social trust to the company and improve the customer relationships immensely.
All of the three presented companies employ different CRM strategies focused on the improvement the companies’ interactions with their clients. All of these companies employ call centers and phone communication in order to reach out to their customers and consult with them about various subjects, inform them about different news and offers, suggest new services, advertise, instruct and educate. Other means of communication such as web, fax and mail are also employed.
This strategy is effective, but can easily be overdone. When a company calls too often or sends out too many emails this starts to bother, annoy and tire the customers, as a result the strategy stops demonstrating integrity and care, but starts to create an atmosphere of unsettlement and pressure.
This way a company may start losing the customers instead of keeping them. Vodafone is an example of overly active application of this CRM strategy, their customers receive too many phone calls. Lush makes an emphasis on lively and cheerful email advertisements with seductive proposition designed in an intriguing way and making the reader stop whatever they were busy with before and continue to read the information or news from Lush.
Their in-store strategy is similar, the sales people are well trained, have deep knowledge of the Lush products and are always ready to provide the customers with information, and help them make a choice. Strategy employed by American Express is quite unusual and very engaging.
At the moment, it creates transparency and makes the process of idea generation visible. The idea of involving clients into the process of project generation is truly brilliant. If thought through and organized properly, this strategy may increase customer loyalty and integrity by means of creating a feeling of closeness and exceptional attention towards the customers from the side of the corporation.
The success all of the three companies earned internationally is the best indicator that their customer relationship management strategies work very well. Vodafone is the world’s leading international mobile operator, Lush is one of the well known environmentally cosmetic brands, and American Express owns the title of one of the world’s biggest financial services corporations.
Works Cited
Dibeehi, Qaalfa. Lush cosmetics consistently shows what it means to have a deliberate customer experience. 2012.
Krishnan, Michael S. Case study: American Express. 2011.
Vodafone. Everis. 2014.