CHAPTER 11 - Building a Customer-Centric Organization (Customer
Relationship Management)
Why is it
important for any company to use CRM strategies to manage customer information?
~ CRM technologies can help organizations answer tough
questions such as who are their best customers and which of their products are
the most profitable.
~ CRM solutions make organizational business processes
more intelligent. This is achieved by understanding customer behavior and
preferences, then realigning product and service offerings and related
communications to make sure they are synchronized with customer needs and
preferences. If you do not know and understand your customers then they might
not be your customers for long.
If the virtual world is the first point of contact between a company and its customers, how might that transform the entire shopping experience?
~ The virtual world could become the first point of
contact between companies and customers and could transform the whole
experience, writes Jo Best on Silicon.com.
~ Some companies believe Second Life could one day become a
first point of contact for customers. Like many other big brands, PA Consulting
has its own offices in Second Life and has learn that simply having an office
to answer customer queries is not enough. Real people, albeit behind avatars,
must be staffing the offices – in the same way having a website is not enough
if there isn’t a call centre to back it up when a would-be customer wants to
speak to a human being. In future, the consultants believe call centres could
one day ask customers to follow up a phone call with them by moving the query
into a virtual world and hanging around in Second Life is more fun than being
stuck on hold.
~ However, currently Second Life and its imitators remain
relatively niche in usage terms and have their own technology boundaries – not
all consumers, particularly the older community, have the tech savvy or indeed
the hardware necessary to make use of virtual worlds.