Customer Relationship Management

The last 5 years have seen an exponention growth of internet as a medium and a boom in social networking services. Since then, companies are leaving no stone unturned to utilize this opportunity to be constantly in-touch with their customers. Product announcements, event invitations,product reviews etc. have all gone 'social'. But, there is a fine line between customer connect and spamming your customers through emails, status updates, tweets and the like.

Continue reading "Getting the best out of social networks for customer connect" »

Posted by Laukik Desai at 5:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Social commerce is being talked about as a game changer for organizations in the near future. The adoption will be quicker for those operating in B2C domain. Social Commerce in itself is an umbrella under which many sub-models can be defined. One such model that is gaining popularirty are the emergence of Group buying sites like Groupon, Snapdeal.com and others.

This business model has seen lot of growth in recent times. Be it the incessant amount of funding for start-ups or the craze among customers, this concept has caught the eyes of all alike. Being a customer for few of them, somehow I couldn't resist myself in analyzing the model from CRM standpoint. Thanks to my passion with stuffs that brings value to customers :).

Continue reading "CRM Essentials for Group-Buying Sites" »

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In order to be more effective and gain competitive edge in the fast evolving markets it is said that the organizations need to understand more and more about the customers and use the insights to talk, engage and interact with their customers more often and more meaningfully in new and innovative ways such as the blogs, twitters and social networking sites etc.

Continue reading "Data Analytics- One of the Key Drivers for CRM?" »

Posted by Anshul Tiwari at 4:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Social CRM treasure hunt - can your social customer executives read the map?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Enterprises need to start taking the social media transactions no lesser seriously than the regular customer engagement transactions when it comes to issues like privacy, response liabilities, customer identity theft, information misrepresentation etc. I recently came across various cases that clearly highlight the need for the same. I will share some of them below in this blog.

Electronic social media platforms is intensifying the visibility, reach and speed with which sentiments and specifics related to customer experience travel the globe. I recall reading a news article sometime back in 2009 where a district judge in Boulder, Colorado (USA) approved the validity of the use of social media tools like twitter and blogs to cover the court trail cases.  It highlights how the speed of information dissemination across various walks of life inclusive of personal, business and even legal eco-system is becoming 'cooler' option that allows influence of the information be 'here and now and across'.

Continue reading "Social CRM - managing the accountability challenges for the customer interactions on social media" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Social CRM - so much is being said, debated, discussed and speculated but sad part is that much of it is more of the same. I guess that's temporary phenomenon because there is little that is available and there are too many to talk about it, another side of the social networking power -  gets everyone to talk, share, express, couldn't have been any other way. But I suppose we may re-live the experience of dotcom days, may be in slightly different shades of color. As I said earlier, more than what is being talked about, I'm excited about stuff that is still to be discovered and to be talked about. Here is one of such side-effects of the social CRM revolution - emergence of 'Social Customer Experience Designers' - a creative specialist community that will have power to revolutionize how social technologies are put to use between enterprises and customers.

Continue reading "Social CRM - uprising of the Next-gen Customer Experience Designers" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The most fascinating thing that I like about the social technology solutions is the never-ending possibilities of surprises. These surprises are the innovation brewing in all garage office across the globe with countless hours being spent to discover the next 'facebook' or 'twitter' that can change the history of mankind. Reality is that probably one out of millions of the ideas running over decades becomes earth shattering but bigger reality that I tend to believe is that in the process of finding that one earth shattering idea, there are many of them that are brought to life an unbelievable portfolio of experiments, I mean real-life experiments that slowly and progressively change the mindsets and thinking of the billions of people across the globe. You and me may not even know about all such possible cases that are happening around us but these micro change agents are continuously working to bring a new tomorrow that many of us wouldn't have thought about. That's precisely the point that I want to debate about when it comes to social CRM or social commerce is considered.

Most of the enterprises strategies are aligned to achieve certain end-state that defines the stated scenario of the enterprise when end-state is accomplished. For example, all along so many years in last decade, there had been an advocated (almost) end-state of the SOA enabled enterprise. Details of technological implementations may vary, specific organizational requirements may vary but still, at large there is some understanding and expectations of the end-state of the enterprise against which most of the enterprises attempted SOA initiatives. Further, take cloud computing, more recent phenomenon. While most of will agree that no one really can predictably say where this whole cloud computing is going to go in long term but based on current vision, there is fair degree of anticipation the end-state configurations of the enterprise as cloud becomes mainstream. This is the end-state against which enterprises are and can be advised for their strategies.

So debate is about whether we believe that there is any ideal end-state against which long terms strategies of social business is possible. As far as today's scenario is concerned, I say NO...and here is why I say that. 

Continue reading "Are you waiting for the strategic big picture of the end-state social CRM?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 8:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Using Personality & Horoscopes in enriching CRM" »

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 5:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By Nishith Gupta

In continuation with the theme of my earlier blog post, CRM embracing Social Media: Opportunities & Challenges, I start with exploring the social media platform on which you are probably reading this content. Yes, you get it right, its blogs!

As I write this blog post, many companies would be taking inputs from different blog feeds to identify both positive and negative points being said about them. Why have blogs that were essentially just meant to be a personal diary in a digital form become such a powerful medium today?

Continue reading "Blogging into the CRM world" »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 5:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Enhancing customer experience is always a challenge. In order to enhance business performance, organizations have to expand their customer base.

Growth happens only when customer relationships with the organization are robust and satisfied. And customer satisfaction can only be increased with effective CRM in an organization.

Continue reading "Measuring CRM Effectiveness" »

Posted by Suhas Pralhad Moharir at 5:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

by Vinod Nag

Stock market investment is always a challenge for anyone, regardless of whether a person is an expert in finance or wants to make an entry into the stock market but does not have any clue about how it works. It is not easy to play a blind game with the market and win. However, to play a wise game, it is important to understand how a company is performing, how are its scrip placed, is it over valued, what is the current market trend, how is this industry sector doing, are there any external influence like change in government rules, market corrections so on and so forth.

Continue reading "Is Predictive Analytics the key to better outcomes and improved customer experience in the stock market?" »

Posted by Guest Author at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

by Vijey Rao

In the recent years, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies have increasingly depended on trade promotions to drive brand recognition, brand interest and translate this awareness into greater sales at point of sale.

The recent downturn of the global economy has made the retail consumer have a close look at the rules of engagement between herself and CPG companies; and she wants “CHANGE” -

Continue reading "Effective Trade Promotion Management in the “Post- Lehman” Economy" »

Posted by Guest Author at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

by Vamsi Krishna Paramjyothi

My previous post on ICRM, "How ICRM can aid in decision support for enhancing customer relationships" would have raised a few questions like, “How does ICRM differ from ACRM?”. Though they sound similar, there is a huge difference, ICRM is a framework where as ACRM is a technology. ICRM stands for Intelligence CRM as it derives customer related intelligence.

Continue reading "How is Intelligence CRM (ICRM) different from Analytical CRM (ACRM)?" »

Posted by Guest Author at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

by Vamsi Krishna Paramjyothi

The market today is mature and highly competitive with several players, providing similar services at competitive prices with new products being released into the market in short intervals.  Competition and the demanding customer, who is willing to shift to another product or service provider, unless his /her wants aren’t met readily, are giving companies a tough time.

Continue reading "How ICRM can aid in decision support for enhancing customer relationships" »

Posted by Guest Author at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Marketing Effectiveness - a term that’s conspicuous with its absence in most organizations is gaining importance in today’s recession hit world. Marketing departments, traditionally a cost centre, are being asked to objectively demonstrate the impact of their marketing activities.

Traditionally the measurement of marketing activities’ output has been done through metrics like brand awareness, campaigns and events responses etc. Due to the subjective nature of these measures, the task of evaluating marketing department’s performance becomes difficult and quite often, organizations end up either aligning marketing goals to sales or setting subjective targets for various activities. The problem with both these approaches is that the organizations are never able to ascertain the exact dollar value that various marketing activities contribute towards the top line as well as the bottom line.

Managers across the industries are faced with some fundamental questions:

• How can a marketing manager know in quantitative terms if it is better to invest cash in a brand-building campaign versus a sales promotion campaign?
• How can they know which campaign was most successful with which kind of target audience?
• How else can they segment their audience for a future campaign if not by analyzing the performance of their past ones?
• How would they derive some learning out of their past marketing activities if they are not tracked by well defined KPI’s?
  

Continue reading "Are you able to measure your Marketing department’s effectiveness?" »

Posted by Indivar Nayyar at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We are not new to receiving unwanted calls from the various marketing agents selling everything from banking products to holiday packages. This kind of cold calling to acquire new customers is simply based on a list of potential customers with hardly any planning and profiling involved. A more mature sales organization or service organization will engage a planning methodology to reach out to customers. Call Planning is an essential task in CRM strategy, where the need is to constantly reach out for a wide range of purposes including acquiring new customers, developing existing customers, after sales service calls, survey calls etc.

Traditional, manual, volume based calling is time consuming, low in efficiency and high in cost. While traditional methods could have served the purpose thus far, the data that an organization has accrued over a period of time has made it impossible to consider all parameters for planning call activity for a representative, say, for a period of one month. Organizations have spent huge amounts in storage to store ‘gazillion’ bytes of data that they have collected for a customer. Harnessing this huge amount of data requires IT solutions backed by strong strategy.  Companies have realized that it is impossible to manually plan for hundreds of sales and service associates over multiple geographies. Business rules change way too often in this dynamic era and manual efforts simply can’t catch up. Absence of feedback loop doesn’t help the overall planning process either. As a result, more time is spent planning than calling.

Continue reading "Make your calls count through intelligent call planning" »

Posted by Raghunath Iyer at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Should you really acquire that customer?" »

Posted by Anil Mehta at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I was recently reviewing a paper written by my colleagues (Mitul Kumar and Nishant Awasthi) on Market Basket Analysis where they have explored the possibility of doing Market Basket Analysis using a standard Business Intelligence apps like Oracle BI, Business Objects, Cognos etc. (This paper will be presented in Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) Conference to be held in Orlando in May this year.) They have taken an easy to implement model of Association Analysis and tried to answer the fundamental question that haunts every marketer: “Do I know what my customers want?”

Continue reading "Do you know what your customers want?" »

Posted by Indivar Nayyar at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

No this is not about a terrorist plot to spread communicable diseases rapidly to bring down an economy :) This is more of an advertising concept which utilizes the immense popularity of social networking in today’s age of Orkut, twitter & Facebook. This is an online and more advanced, quicker and larger form of the traditional Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing. This has been around for more than a decade now but it is yet to be leveraged by CRM product vendors.

Continue reading "Viral Marketing and CRM: A heady combination" »

Posted by Shreedeep Panicker at 6:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the last decade, customer centricity has become a strategic approach for growth in a competitive marketplace. Global operations, increasing customer interactions coupled with low storage costs has led to an information explosion and organizations are struggling to get common data into one place - let alone use it for business decisions.
Is your organization able to consistently report a ‘single version of truth’?

Continue reading "How can we seamlessly assimilate customer information and accurately assess customer profitability? (Part 1)" »

Posted by Indivar Nayyar at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)