Customer Relationship Management

The marketing division in an organization has several functions like preparing annual/quarterly marketing plans, setting goals, allocating budgets, dividing the budgets to various brands/categories/products, campaign launch, etc. These activities should be properly managed and tracked to make it a real closed loop process for organizational marketing goals to properly percolate till the bottom most activity. Generally these activities are managed by different roles in the organization working at various levels, right from Marketing Head to a partner (retailer). Each one of them use a different system or a tool of their convenience, it can be an excel sheet or even a notepad. It becomes a herculean task for the marketing team not only to ensure process adherence but also to collate the information from various sources and use it for analysis and planning. Hence it is really important that a proper process and an application supporting the process are in place to plan, execute, track and finally measure the ROI.

This is where CRM system fits in. Over the years, CRM products have evolved to be mature enough to help organizations in handling any customer facing function more efficiently and effectively. A good CRM product has provisions for performing all marketing activities, including launching a campaign successfully, and tracking and measuring parameters. The current CRM products have provision to create campaigns, set goals, targets, and budgets too. These products also provide automation to get the budgets approved from the relevant managers/departments. One can create expenses for each channel as well as integrate with financial systems to capture the purchase orders for each expense item. Hence each dollar spent can be tracked and alerts can be scheduled whenever expenses go beyond the approved budget. Thus, it works not only as an operational support system, but also as an effective tracking tool.

CRM products also come with full fledged offer management capabilities which provide ability to create communication channel specific offers. Since all these are in the same system and processes are designed with validations and automation, everyone has to adhere to the process. The campaign objectives and goals flow down till the last stage of campaign management thereby ensuring that each aspect of campaign is built around campaign objectives. One challenge that marketers face is in collating the correct segment audience from various sources. This challenge has been addressed very effectively as the CRM products are normally integrated with analytics systems which help in creating the target segment for a campaign from the existing customer/prospect base. If there are more prospects for external sources, one can import them as lists into the CRM application.  The combination of CRM and Analytics is definitely a great tool in the hands of marketers to carry out their activities, but with proper next generation decision support systems in place, marketing effectiveness will scale new heights.

CRM products can have an automated response capturing mechanism, where any activity performed by a customer in response to the campaign will be automatically captured. This can be done even if it is an ATL campaign where the campaigns are not launched for a targeted set of customers using channels like, email, direct mail, SMS, phone, etc, but through mass media, in which case capturing and analyzing campaign response is very difficult. Campaign response can be captured by feeding the campaign code at the time of customer interaction. This information can be directly used by analytics to generate several reports on campaign performance, which in turn can be used in refining the subsequent launch of the campaign or in planning future campaigns. With the advent of more sophisticated analytics tools that support real time decision support, next generation marketing will be more effective and responsive as they will be guided by intelligence.

Now the question is, “are marketers really using these CRM product capabilities to the maximum extent?”