Customer Relationship Management

We have seen the tremendous rise in internet usage in the recent past. Even with such fast growth, internet penetration is only about 25% of the world population with a large scope for further growth. Also, commerce over the internet is growing due to increased transaction security and ease of operation. Companies should take advantage of this online channel for trade to increase customer satisfaction and reduce cost of operations through a self service facility. But in order to take the full advantage of online channel, companies should conduct a detailed study of the various factors involved before embarking on their online strategy.

Continue reading "Improve Customer Experience through a well planned Online Self Service Strategy" »

Posted by Suhas Kanade at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For companies to innovate, it is largely understood that there are two components involved: exploiting existing internal repository of knowledge and secondly, exploring new ideas, some of which can be directly adopted from external sources including customers, suppliers, partners etc. On one hand, managers may experience a cultural inertia on the idea of customer as a collaborator; on other hand, there is also an access issue - how do you make relevant customer feedback flow through the organization?

Continue reading "Could CRM lead to innovation?" »

Posted by Arun George at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Some of you might have read the recent blog entry titled “How CRM products can aid Marketing” by fellow Infosys CRM blogger Vamsi Krishna. He ended his entry with the question “are marketers really using these CRM product capabilities to the maximum extent?”

While that certainly is a relevant question to ponder for small scale and stand alone marketing implementations, a deeper look at the needs of large scale Enterprise Marketing departments seems to indicate that functionality coverage in today’s CRM products is not sufficient.

Continue reading "Is functionality coverage in CRM products today sufficient for Enterprise Marketing?" »

Posted by Alex Rishi Sankar at 03:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The New Normal is the “Now” Normal. This was the theme of the key note address at SAP Insider conference currently underway at Orlando, FL (see my previous blog post, SAP CRM 2010 Insider Conference). As the economy is coming out of a major slow down, the organizations are not necessarily changing their cost structures that came under tremendous pressure but expecting to continue at the same levels and do more with less. New investments are being planned but only with an expectation to demonstrate better results on an immediate basis - the ‘now’ normal. SAP’s executives discussed ways how SAP’s suite of products can be leveraged in identifying such targeted investments which will help solve today’s complex business problems, be nimble, effective, profitable and quicker to implement.

Continue reading "SAP Insider CRM 2010- The New Normal is the “Now” normal" »

Posted by Rishi Handa at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who has experienced the last fifteen years of generational shift in marketing would have seen every aspect of marketing strategy and varied focused approaches towards selling. We do remember a time when organizations were more ‘product’ focused, launching of products was not all that frequent and retiring cycles were long. Customers didn’t have many options other than sticking on (in fact, the term customer experience was not used very frequently) as there was less competition. Then came the era of competition, where organizations not only thought about acquiring new customers but retaining the customers became a key priority. This was the dawn of a ‘Customer’ focused approach with up-selling, cross-selling, loyalty etc being the new buzz words.

Continue reading "Importance of service based approach" »

Posted by Amit Goel at 07:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My previous post, “Marketing without measuring Marketing ROI is casualty” ended by stating that CRM products can help in enhancing marketing operations and measuring ROI more accurately. In this blog I will try to bring out how CRM products can aid marketers.

Continue reading "How CRM products can aid Marketing" »

Posted by Vamsi Krishna at 09:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Most CRM initiatives are started with much expectations and enthusiasm and perhaps with much funds allotted as well. But the key success factor is having a systematic approach to identify and assess levers for business value and impact for these implementations.

Continue reading "Assessing the Value of your CRM Initiatives" »

Posted by Khanchana at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The success of a CRM implementation lies in its acceptance for use by the various stakeholders. The stakeholders vary depending on the industry and application in question. Some of the stakeholders commonly involved in CRM are top management, marketing managers, retail sales agents / call center agents / field sales agents, customers using self care applications, dealers and product managers. Each stakeholder has their own set of expectations from the CRM system. Based on my experience in working with some of these stakeholders, I have listed below some of their expectations:

Continue reading "Stakeholder Expectations from a CRM Application" »

Posted by Suhas Kanade at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Having worked on CRM system implementations for quite some time, I have been listening to one common statement from business / product managers - I am not satisfied with the CRM system that is being deployed/was recently deployed. It is a common complaint across the spectrum, right from small businesses to the larger enterprises. Why this does happen again and again, that too across the world? Is it that technology cannot meet business requirements and expectations all the time? In this post I would like to discuss one of my observations and find some ways to address this issue.

Continue reading "CRM Strategy - Business vs. Technology" »

Posted by Raja Sekhar Ravi at 04:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I read an article on “Indian FMCG industry”, the article talks about lavish marketing spends in FMCG. This year marketing spends growth was twice that of the sales growth in Indian FMCG industry. In one way this is good news, Marketing is being given importance but unfortunate thing is that they are running towards a big disaster without measuring ROI on Marketing. Marketing was considered as a function which doesn’t provide any value addition when compared with its sibling sales. It is considered as a cost center.

Continue reading "Marketing without measuring Marketing ROI is casualty" »

Posted by Vamsi Krishna at 04:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In this post and in a few forthcoming ones I intend to dwell upon key factors that builds a loyal customer base.

Clear customer focus and a customer centered/driven  value-chain are hygiene factors  to build loyalty  in today’s cluttered market place. Customer centric processes are not only mandatory in CRM functions like Sales, Marketing and Service/after-sales support but also in the core functions like order processing, manufacturing and product development.

Continue reading "Building a Loyal Customer Base" »

Posted by Khanchana at 04:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Not sure if you all noticed this quite development over the last weekend, Amazon finally after all the regulatory checks was able to close the acquisition of Zappos, this company as we know became a billion dollar company form a shoe store.

Continue reading ""Zappos and the way to ride the Social Marketing wave"" »

Posted by Rituparn Prem Dixit at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | 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 at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scene-1
A tweet by client9 - @no1insocialmedia | thanks for the demo today. Would love it if the community creation in the tool could latch on to the private cloud.

Scene-2
Our Mike, Matt and John(the CIO) are in a meeting to pore over tomorrow’s sales pitches.
Matt: John, Mike was mentioning about some feedback he received on Twitter today from our client from the coast side, about cloud integration capability.

Scene-3/Act1  John: Yeah, Matt lets put it on our to-do list anyways the product management has a long list.

Scene-3/Act2  John: Great Mikey! Matt, let’s use this feedback and see if we can prioritize this one as client9 has been a good advocate of our business. Lets use this feedback effectively as otherwise we need to request such ones. It also costs you see.

Continue reading "Social Media – Feedback is essential and an important ingredient of SCRM. Use it to benefit" »

Posted by Venkataraman Ramanathan at 04:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In part I I had looked at why companies implement CRM and had promised to answer the following questions “What factors have the maximum impact on the success of CRM projects and initiatives?” And “CRM initiative will impact which all areas?” in my subsequent posts. Well it has been a long wait to discover answers to these intricate questions  so without much ado I will look at them straight away –

Continue reading "Why do companies implement CRM and other such questions – Part II" »

Posted by Shreedeep Panicker at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a theory. In the English language, 'Customer Experience' is possibly the term with the most variety of definitions. I wish to add to this record and hence this blog.

There are two dimensions of Customer Experience that I need to lay emphasis on while defining CEM– firstly, it is measurable and secondly, it isn’t an engine that runs in isolation to generate success. I’ll elaborate on both these dimensions…

Continue reading "Is Customer Experience a lone ranger?" »

Posted by Badrinath Srinivasan at 06:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

With the evolution of Social media on a rapid scale, what with Salesforce now coming out with Service Cloud 2; is it already time to think how much of this can be measured?

In the good old days of CRM and other evolving concepts/strategies the innovation, acceptance, implementation, integration, feedback, service quality etc. took time, effort and a lot of money. Over the years all of these have been dealt with and there are many a ready-made solutions and excellent products made available. We have seen CRM mature over the years. The TCO, ROI, scalability, flexibility and high-performance were critical factors to success and these were taken care of. The measurement per se, of CRM has been lost in this mêlée somewhere though not completely and it came in late. Measuring the CRM success via the Balanced Scorecard model is one way.

Continue reading "Social CRM –Measure it, harness the benefits in tandem – A Balanced Scorecard Interpretation" »

Posted by Venkataraman Ramanathan at 06:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)