The use of CRM as a business strategy

Certainly customers never had so much information available to make purchasing decisions like these days.  They have a large variety of resources, including mobile devices, smartphones, tablets, online communities that allows customers to publish reviews about their experiences, price comparison websites, wich in turn, helped change completely the way they make decisions.

In some situations, I have met a large number of people with a limited view of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), defining it as a technological solution that allows to capture information about customers and aims to increase levels of customer satisfaction, when in fact, should be seen mainly as a solution that supports the business strategies of the companies, not only improving customer satisfaction, but also improving the customer experience in the using and buying processes.

The CRM solution applied to shared ownership (timeshare and fractional) and hotel industry always had its importance as a management solution based on relationship marketing, which seeks to build a customer history, on both situations, considering prospects or effective customers, compiling data about them related to their purchases and so many other possibilities of crossing relevant information, which in turn, consequently can help increase the customer satisfaction and conquering guests and multi-owners loyalty.

The CRM implementation involves several changes, including cultural, which must reach all hierarchical levels of the company, once it will worth nothing if the qualification of sales and data entered and managed into the system were wrongly made, for example, adopting non-standard processes.

CRM should not be seen as a solution that favors only the marketing department because good solutions offers functions that go beyond psychographic, demographic, geographic and behavioral segmentation, offering mainly features that supports the sales team, such as, sales pipeline vision, helping managers to identify the performance of their team, progress towards reaching the goals, status of sales opportunities, amount of revenue stopped at each stage of the sales pipeline, performance by product type, track campaign results and several other possibilities, helping to simplify, map all company business processes and mainly creating a business model more integrated between sales and marketing in order to provide the best experiences for customers.

Today, technology allows the combination of several tools that can help managers to have different customer profiles, as well as, can identify the needs and expectations of these customers in different ways. And of course, can be considered several combinations, such as, CRM with PMS, CRM with social media and CRM with specific loyalty programs, for example.

For a loyalty program has a good level of acceptance and success, managers should consider in their planning several factors, among them, building an effective and relevant communication, giving people in their target market incentives in order to have the largest number of active users into the program, creating more values for them. And yes, As a good manager it’s essencial you know how to calculate the customer life cycle, once it’s one of the most important metrics because it can helps you during the planning stage, analysis and direction of actions.

These loyalty programs aims to provide competitive advantage for companies, having greater long-term profitability, increasing sales or strengthening the image of the company and improving the customer’s perception of services/products delivered.

Today, the most of loyalty programs has been summarized in the following format “buy, earn points and rescue”, that we still can consider interesting programs, but it’s worth doing a previous analysis in order to know if these kind of programs meets the needs and goals of the company, once these can present certain limitations, such as, the possibility of creating behaviors and incentives and new ways to reach the target market or it’s worth hiring a sophisticated solution based on Technologies such as Big Data and Gamification, that have a greater number of resources and stimulate participants engagement, guaranteeing better results in markeing campaigns.

It’s essencial to uderstand and satisfy the expections not only of your customers, but also employees. Surely, there are several other elements to be considered and discussed about relationship and CRM, but it’s worth considering that whatever your decision as manager,  whenever possible choose strategies oriented to your customer loyalty and satisfaction.