CIOs need to be thinking in terms of spending smarter not spending less, Gartner has advised and reckons some zero-cost or low-cost investments in customer relationship management (CRM) systems would provide businesses with a solid opportunity to generate post-recovery growth.
“If the right strategies are employed now, then companies will get a ‘sling shot’ effect going into the eventual recovery, putting them well ahead of the rivals who chose to wait and who equate CRM success with spending more money on technology,” Gartner’s Scott Nelson explained.
Many organisations have large investments in call centres, web sites, marketing systems and sales force automation.
The analyst group maintains that with these pieces already in place, IT groups can wrap effective strategies around those tools by mapping out several low-cost strategies.
It recommends exploring how to create online communities of customers through the use of social media, like blogs, Twitter and Facebook to study how customers interact with each other, and with the business.
Customer segmentation has to be re-examined, Gartner has also said. “Many segmentation schemes are based on psycho-demographics, profitability or account attributes. What about having one based on privacy concerns, or another one on share of wallet?”
Most all businesses are impacted in some way by fluctuating market-confidence and consumer-spending habits. An understanding of customer behaviour can become a competitive differentiator. By driving and supporting initiatives in this arena, Gartner argues that IT can deliver new levels of business intelligence from the rich CRM data sources that are available.
There is a need to put analytics tools to work, the analyst house has said, so that customer data can be mined in new ways, to establish if there are any patterns in customer attrition or channel usage, or to look at the next most likely to buy models. Some of this CRM data will through up new insights about the businesses customer segmentation strategy.
Customer segmentation insight can lead to better sales and marketing discipline and increased revenues, without the business necessarily resorting to price changes.
It’s been said also that offshore services can offer some potential in providing extra muscle for the heavy data crunching that is a precursor to intelligent customer data mining, which should be done by internal business analysts equipped with business intelligence and analytics tool.
Gartner also urges IT shops spend time studying the customer processes and redesigning them, and then get to work on organisation redesign at a time when no few or no new systems are being installed.
“CRM is all about change,” Nelson said. “Changing from product to customers, changing age-old processes, changing enterprise mindsets, and changing how companies relate to customers.”
