Three Pronged Approach in CRM Projects I
Salient points of CRM Projects:
The CRM Way of doing business is by linking to customers, stakeholders, share holders, partners and suppliers through whatever channel is appropriate based on stored and applied knowledge. The organization will continue to enhance its overall relationships for continuous, competitive advantage.
According to Three Pronged Approach, the integration between external environment, clients, shareholders, partners, vendors/suppliers (external environment) and the management, executives and the other resources (internal environment) through appropriate use of knowledge of management tools.
This means – mapping the entire scope of services and other related functions to create an established relationship with customers, stakeholders, shareholders i.e. both external and internal clients and resources. This form of solution is a holistic one, which circumvents all risks and helps to develop credibility with value based services. This can also be termed as a Macro solution, which can be further fragmented to point solutions.
Note: Point solutions are normally associated with divisional needs or needs that merely solve a particular problem without considering the needs of the whole organization and their implications regarding strategic decision.
Three Pronged Approach is a holistic approach in providing A macro and micro solution to a problem. In this approach all the divisional or functional entities are considered.
Fact: Three Pronged Approach enables a business enterprise to align its serves and products to customers’ requirements or the market demand, without trying to lure the customer through false promises highlighting false benefits, that, in reality, are of no intrinsic benefit to the customer or are core benefits, but falsely promoted as additional benefits to build customer loyalty or relationship/retention benefits for the business enterprise (organization), but does not help in forming the credibility of the organization in the market. e.g.
· Promote sale of products through discounts on inflated prices.
· Promise life time service on a price that the customer may not be able to enumerate, because the definition of lifetime itself is subjective.
· Highlight the benefits of well organized and professional sales force; in fact, it is a necessity of any business enterprise to have one and not a privilege for a customer to be served by one.
· Event based actions and automated marketing service.
· Personalized e-services.
· Grandiose in infrastructure and frills.
These are mere false promises or frills in the name of CRM.
The best example of CRM gone wrong is the bursting of the DOT COM bubble. Virtual benefits proposed were unable to satisfy the expectations they had created in the minds of the customers. Therefore, all the technicalities associated with the DOT COM business initiatives could not achieve what they had envisioned to.
Following the principle of Three Pronged Approach (Organization):
CRM should not be implemented without integrating it with the vision and mission of the organization; with full knowledge of the total cost, benefits of undertaking the initiative in terms of both the internal as well as the external environment.
For proper implementation of CRM as part of a business process, a well defined and comprehensive roadmap of the entire process is needed. Then the CRM technology (if any CRM technical solution is being used) should be integrated to each segment or division of the process.
Implementation of CRM technology (automated CRM) in human centric process/function, such as in sales and marketing or in service sector, the existing system needs to be organized and every aspect of it should be well defined. For instance, to implement Call Centre Service as a CRM technology initiative with the business objective of turning around the figures on the dipping sales charts due to the insufficient results generated by the existing sales force, in itself will be, rather is a failed objective. Call centre cannot replace the existing sales force in executing the entire sales, marketing and market research activity. But it can complement the existing sales force and provide the following support in helping boost up sales of the organization’s products/services:
- Create database of prospective clients.
- Provide support in terms of data-warehousing, maintaining necessary details of the customer base.
- Help in cross-selling, when the organization has more than one product or service to offer.
- Provide first hand information for market analysis to be aware of the market trends.
- Pre-sales and post sales support to provide extra service benefit to the customers in the form of service within warranty period and this provides vital feedback on consumer opinion and sales trends, vital for market research.
