CRM Capabilities and the Customer Life Cycle Essay

Customer acquisition consists of the business processes in the CLC leading up to the customer moment, when consumers become customers . . . or not. This includes awareness generation, knowledge transfer, consideration, pre-sales, and evaluation. Capabilities include consumer surveys in business operations, tracking enterprise-wide customer interactions in business management, and market basket analysis in business intelligence. The enterprise clearly requires customer acquisition to maintain and expand revenues and profits. A business without nev. customer acquisition will shrink and eventually fail. But compared to customer retention amf expanding â€Å"share of customer†, customer acquisition can be expensive. I Expanding the â€Å"share of customer† is gaining the largest portion of acquisitions made by each individual customer in the global marketplace. The proportion of a customer’s move, that goes to a particular enterprise is known as the share of customer. Example capabilities include delivery of new information to a customer through business operations as the custome-, re-enters the CLC, taking advantage of cross-sell opportunities using business managerne7- capabilities, and identifying cross-sell opportunities through business intelligence capabilitie&. The benefits of expanding â€Å"share of customer† are similar to customer retention—additional sales without the cost of acquiring a new customer. However, expanding the share of customer is as valuable as customer retention. Most companies find that their most profitable customer-, are the ones that spend the largest percentages of their budgets with the enterprise. For example, one bank recently identified that every one of their most profitable customers (the top 20 per cent) gave their business to the bank, while none of the least profitable custome7,: (the bottom 20 per cent) gave their business to the bank. What is new is the customer-cents_~ nature of applications, which means organizing CRM processes around the customer rath—, than marketing, sales, or any other internal function. Measurements and feedback from the customer enable improvements in the CRM process. The customer’s viewpoint becomes aF integral part of the process, allowing it to change with the customer’s needs. In other words. companies base their actions not on the priorities of functional fiefdoms, but on the over†72 corporate objective of providing customer satisfaction. However, before aggressively deploying CRM applications, managers might have to restructure customer-interaction processes. Functional and organizational structurei tend to compartmentalize the various activities that go into serving the customer. Such fragmentation prevents customer information from being dispersed far enough within the organization to be useful; in fact, it often stands in the way of efforts to build a relationship As a result, customized service is difficult and consequently, organizations tend to treat all customers the same – a damning impediment to building closer relationships. To counter fragmentation, leading-edge companies strive to take a more customer centred approach to CRM. There is a growing trend towards managing all the activities that ientify, attract, and retain customers in an integrated fashion, that is, managing them as a process that cuts across functional departments. By addressing these activities as a set of CRM processes, organizations can create end-to-end communications and performance accountability for entire sets of activities. In short, a CRM infrastructure is really a portfolio of process competencies.