The Sunday Mail
Entrepreneurship Matters
Dr Kudzanai Vere
All businesses anywhere exist solely because there is a customer whom they expect to buy their product or service. As such, the customer becomes the focal point for any organisation be it a startup, small and medium enterprise, corporate or conglomerate. This means every business must have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) framework that identifies, manages, maintains and retains its customers for growth and sustainability.
It is often said a customer is a king and if so, there should be a deliberate strategy in place to establish and manage the relationship that subsist with the king for support and continuous supply of essentials. Every other subject takes orders from the king and any deviation receives a just recompense
The way you relate to your customers have a direct effect on your topline, sustainability and survival in the business regardless of sector and size.
What then is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
Numerous definitions have been proffered by a number of proponents of the CRM, the majority of which refers to a software that collects customer data from various sources for use by the organisation. What you think when reading the statement customer relationship management statement stands taller and true as its definition.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategic process and practice of identifying, managing, maintaining and retaining customers through the establishment of mutually beneficial relationships with the ultimate aim of boosting sales and organisations sustainability and relevance in the market.
An organisation is only relevant if it manages to maintain its relationship with customers.
The advent of technology have led people into coming up with some software that assist in managing an organisation’s relationship with its customer and these software are popularly know as customer relationship management (CRM) Software. I have seen more emphasis in today’s literature on the metrics produced by these software. I have seen companies failing to manage their relationships with customers and yet they have the so called CRM software.
Like I said in my definition of customer relationship management that, it is a strategic process and practice by an organisation that seeks to identify, manage, maintain and retain customers obviously with the assistance of technology it will become quicker to gather, store, analyse, access and retrieve customer data and put it to use for the benefit of the organisation. CRM is far from a mere software. It is the entire process and the software is only coming in as a tool to assist the process of managing the relationship.
How does customer relationship management works?
Before I get to how it works, there is need to understands its components and be able to define them.
Every time you see a customer smiling home from shopping, there are a number of operational interactions that would have aided each other in order to delight that customer or client. Within the customer relationship management process, practice and matrices, we have three major pillars that is people, processes and technology. It is basically the harmonious interaction of these three that ushers in a relationship between any organisation and its customers.
People
The whole process starts with people, we have customers on one hand and the organisation’s staff or employees on the other side. As you know organisations exists to solve people problems in the market and as such people communicate their challenges in the form of enquiries to organisations whose organisations have to respond through the provision of products and services to the client in question.
Within the interaction between the customer and organisation, there are a number of processes that are involved some include the use of technology while others involves physical interfacing. As all this happens, an organisation must make sure that it records electronically or otherwise customer information for it forms their important database for future use as the thrust is to build and sustain a lasting relationship with the customer.
There are various CRM models that are used to create and sustain an organisations’ relationship with its customers and these includes the IDIC model that speaks of identifying who your customers are, differentiating the customers to see which ones have the most value now and those that will bring future value to the organisation, interacting with the customer to understand them better so as to give them exactly what they want or even surpassing their expectations. The C in IDIC stands for customisation of the offer to meet their expectations.
There are a number of other CRM models that assist you connect better and manage well the organisations’ relationship with the customers.
In order to relate well with someone, there is every need to have a deeper understanding of them. Once that is in place, you will then be able to customise your services and products to suite the requirements of this customer you now fully understand. Like I admitted in this article that with the aid of technology which I categorically stated as one of the pillars of customer relationship management, the whole process is made easier.
I would rather start by defining the word process so that the rest of the issues are better understood. Simply defined, a process is a series of activities that interact together to produce a result or results. Processes in business are often time recurrent. You will find out that the people issues discussed can only be enhanced by a series of processes and procedures for there to be results at the end of the interactions.
How do organisations know what their customers want? The answer is, through the process of inquiry. On the other hand the organisation can also embark on some extensive marketing campaigns to stimulate market desire and create awareness of whatever products and service they have and such is a process which obviously follows certain organizational procedures.
The interactive processes between the organisation and the customer ushers in issues customer service, which I normally want to call exceptional or excellent customer service which ultimately breeds customer loyalty. The organisations’ public relations and communication with the external customers be they suppliers, customers or any other stakeholder need to be upfront for they collectively feeds into the so much envisaged relationship between the customer and the organisation.
If the organisation doesn’t relate well with its suppliers of their core products, that will hit hard on the relationship between the same organisations with its customers for they will find no products to buy resulting in customers voting with either their feet or money for competitors. So the issue of customer relationship management has a number of aspects that tie up together for the relationship to be a healthy and working one.
Technology
The importance of technology cannot be over emphasised. Everything these days revolves around technology. The current the technology that you use to gather, analyse, store or disseminate customer information the better positioned you are in the market. Technology enhances your operational efficiency and your overall standing in the market.
These days you will see to it that even some small and medium organisations have now embraced the issue of using point of sale systems for they have seen that they are ten times faster than the manual case sale. Technology ushers in efficiency and a high degree of accuracy when everything is captured well.
Communication with customers has been enhanced for there are numerous digital options that organisations can use to interact with customers. Nowadays we talk of emails, Facebook, WhatsApp, Zoom, Google meet and even phone calls among others. The processes and procedures that I spoke about earlier on are quickened through the use of advanced technological gadgets.
Once customer information is captured, it is synthesised and processed in line with the expected use. Ready customer metrics can be extracted from customer relationship management software which is specifically designed to collect and analyse customer related information.
Conclusion
Customer relationship management is key to organisational development and sustainability for it touches on the central issue behind every businesses existence, which is the customer. Any organisation that aspires to grow and succeed regardless of its sector and size need to embrace customer relationship management.
Determined to engage, inspire and transform generations in the areas of business and personal development.
The writer, Dr Kudzanai Vere is an entrepreneur, author of four books, business and personal development, multiple award winning entrepreneurship and business coach. Dr Vere has coached more than 5 000 entrepreneurs globally and continues to impact people in the areas of entrepreneurship, business and personal development. He is the founder & CEO of Kudfort, Premium Business Network International, Transformational Mindset Institute, Tengesa Online and the Institute of Entrepreneurs Zimbabwe. Contact Dr Kudzanai Vere for transformational entrepreneurship and business coaching and training on [email protected] or +263 719 592232.
