Page 206 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Unit 8: Managing Customer Relations

optimisation applications are emerging to meet the demands of real time applications which Notes
could identify the best next action you need to take in managing a particular customer relationship.

Step 6: Managing Customer Contacts and Interactions

Businesses need to think carefully about how they plan to manage customer relationships in the
future given the heightened expectations of consumers who wish to be recognised as individuals
and treated consistently across all touch points.
So how does that affect your requirements? How complex and targeted are your customer
contact plans; how much content, how many channels and how much test and learn do you
expect to run? What role do trigger campaigns play and what data and analytics are required to
support these? Are wave campaigns a key part of your plan? How do you expect decisions made
within the system to be deployed back in social media activities and your website?

Again technology can come to your rescue. Some campaign management platforms are more
‘conversational aware’ than others, often described as dialogue management or engagement
management tools as they now fully embrace multichannel and multi-wave. Importantly some
will enable you to combine dialogues either initiated by your customers (‘pull’) or by your
marketing team (‘push’).
Advanced engagement management tools now provide capabilities to integrate with your
content management solutions too. This would enable you to render your content consistently
across your channels and your customer’s devices. Content management providers are also
providing integration into the social media space too (e.g. Facebook and Twitter) ensuring that
the consistency of content deployment really does extend to all channels.

Step 7: Reporting and Evaluation

In all likelihood many people in your business will be attaching a great deal of significance to
future CRM initiatives and may even describe them as ‘mission critical’. In many businesses this
is reflected by the thirst for performance metrics well beyond the confines of your marketing
department.

So define your feedback loops from campaign metrics to ensure the right data feeds on results
and actions are also being fed into the process. What type of reports do you require; what are
your KPIs and metrics? How detailed do they need to be, how can people drill down into the
results and indeed who do you wish to access these results and why?
The trend is for businesses to place less reliance on spreadsheet based approaches and separate
platforms underpinned by online analytical processing, as experience has proved this can be
both time consuming and resource hungry to manage. So you should consider the benefit of a
more integrated approach which could link directly to your CRM database allowing users to
self-serve themselves.

Your IT department is likely to benefit too as less resource would be required to manage one
single platform rather than several. Intelligent dashboards can access the single data repository
to provide highly graphical interactive reporting accessed via a browser.
This approach now caters for the new but growing group of information consumers in
organisations who wish to consume highly visual, easy to interpret reports. They may wish to
be able to drill down further into data at the click of a button, but not necessarily wish to create
reports from scratch.

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