Page 220 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Unit 8: Managing Customer Relations

Self Assessment Notes

Fill in the blanks:
6. Customer experiences include every point in which the customer ................. with your
business, product or service.

7. Consumer’s perception is ................. in nature for the business.
8. ................. business strategy to acquire, grow and retain profitable customer relationships.
9. Customer Experience Management is a method of ................. customer loyalty

10. Emotional glue can prove to be a ................. to CRM.
8.3 Customer Profile

Customer profiling refers to the practice of working out who your customers are. This generally
includes important demographic information, such as their gender, profession, age, and level of
educational attainment. By building up a picture of your customers’ demographics, you can
identify the groups who are more likely to use your company.

As any business owner knows, understanding your customers will play a crucial role in your
company’s success. After all, if you don’t know key information such as what they are looking
for from your company, it will be much harder to give them what they want – and they’ll be
more likely to look elsewhere for their goods and services. Having a good understanding of
your customers can also teach you things such as who your business is reaching, giving you vital
information to analyse so you can determine the success of your business plan. This is one of the
reasons customer profiling is so important.
Some characteristics correlate positively with companies performing well in customer
relationship management: excellent products, excellent management, and the informed use of
knowledge about customers. An insufficient knowledge base of customers limits the value
which a company can offer to those customers. Knowing customers better, a corporation can
precisely invest in valuable customers and reduce the cost spent on poorly performing customers.
The basic component of customer knowledge comes from a customer profile that is obtained by
the use of a database and data mining technologies used in organizations. Building customer
profiles is one of the most popular strategies for knowing more about customers. In summary,
using a customer profile is the technique which converts raw information about customers into
the strategic-support knowledge that reinforces the value of goods which companies offer
customers.
There are two main kinds of knowledge sources about customers: customer profiles and customer
participation. In addition to getting a customer profile to identify customer needs, corporations
also need to seek solution to gain more tacit information from customers to know them better.
This situation indicates that corporations should build certain channels and launch activities to
enable the transformation of tacit information with customers. Based on preceding discussion
on customer participation, it is possible for corporations to interact with customers and get
insights of customer needs through customer participation. Getting customers to participate in
value delivery processes helps customers to know corporation ability better and raises the
customers’ perception on goods. The customer participation also has positive effects on customer
satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer retention.

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