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.
But how would one measure the effectiveness of CRM for an organization? Below are some criteria that can be applied:
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.
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" »
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)?" »
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" »
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:
Continue reading "Are you able to measure your Marketing department’s effectiveness?" »
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" »
Continue reading "Should you really acquire that customer?" »
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?”
Join us as we discuss the evolution of the cloud and try to understand how the clouds might transcend horizons and come offshore.
Continue reading "Cloud Computing Part 1 : Are we doing it already?" »
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" »
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’?
