Many organizations
aspire to be customer-centric, yet few have figured out the recipe for
successfully transforming their business. It seems like it was just yesterday
that companies were discovering the importance of implementing CRM technologies
and strategies aimed at acquiring new customers, managing effectively customer
interactions, selling more to current customers, analyzing the effectiveness of
marketing activities and providing better customer service. All in the name of
building stronger, longer lasting business relationships. Well, today is a new
day, and the customers now decide who they do business with, as well as how and
when they will do so.
"CMR" –
or "Customer Managed Relationships" started to be spoken about 2
years ago but still gets little airplay despite Web 2.0 gaining increased
traction as a full-fledged platform fostering collaboration, participation and
community building. Companies will only achieve improved results in this
“customer managed world” if marketers are quickly understanding and embracing
this new concept, and are changing the way they define customer centricity
accordingly. Implementing a CMR initiative means that the whole organization
actually understand that the customer is in control and is the one managing the
relationship.
CMR includes three
things:
1. An ability to
rethink and reshape your organization and its knowledge for increased customer
engagement.
2. Internet
enabled management tools for true customer empowerment.
3. An ability to react to the information being generated and used by customers for an improved management of online reputation.
If executed
correctly CMR generates three major benefits over CRM:
1. It is easier to
implement since the customer is usually the one doing the complex stuff.
2. It creates lock
in since customers having invested their data with your organization may not
move easily.
3. It allows your company to move faster than competition since a trusted relationship is being built with the customer.
Even if the CMR
concept is becoming widely talked about and accepted into the business
community, it is time to recognize that empowered customers are increasingly
interested in making their own choices in how they interact with companies that
they do business with. Customers prefer to have a choice over how marketers
reach them, what products or services are marketed to them, and who markets to
them.
The concept of CMR takes
all of this into consideration by allowing companies to engage and involve
their customers in order to create a truly collaborative customer experience
that makes the customers feel as though they are an essential element in the
entire business relationship. This new marketing and customer interaction
paradigm truly puts the customer into the driver's seat and marketers should
recognize that the customer relationship encompasses information-seeking as
well as information-contributing behavior.
CMR is indeed
about the collaborative customer experience. It is the convergence and
integration of multiple data points which leverage customer interactions and
Web 2.0 applications & services. It is a philosophy and strategy for
collaboration with customers through the provision of tools, technologies,
processes, culture, products and services … with a focus on providing enhanced
customer experiences that will create appropriate value for all parties
involved. That means that not only does the company need to provide the goods
and services, but also the tools and culture to make the experience of that
customer one of paramount and unparalleled value to that customer and thus to
the company in return.
Companies are
taking the first steps towards incorporating Web 2.0 applications into their
marketing and CRM processes. Smart organizations start leveraging user groups,
social networks, message boards, blogs and video sharing. They are engaging the
customer via personal pages, RSS, social filters and making it on-demand
through mobile web, mobile applications, SMS, pod casting, streaming video and
so forth.
The decades-old
CRM formulation of “People-Process-Technology to maximize relationships and
provide seamless coordination between all customer-facing functions” is quickly
being replaced by a strong focus around customer experience and the mapping of
customer interactions. As customer marketing becomes more deeply involved in
shaping customer experiences across multiple touch points, campaigns inherently
become more sophisticated and complex. By implementing appropriate strategies
and using best of breed CRM technologies as a foundation, marketers will be
able to optimize virtually all these complex processes and interactions,
enabling them to focus their resources on sales, understanding their customers,
defining strategies, and delivering more creative customer approaches.
The organizing
foundation of CMR is to build high value relationships via applications and
services that promote an ongoing dialogue, both online and offline. These
principles create personal relationships that drive advocacy and continuous
communication improvement as customers start to take ownership of the
relationship. Corporations also achieve continuous improvement by embracing
collaboration between all members of its customer ecosystem. The result of
doing so is an improvement in the quality of product and service delivery, an
upgrade of the customer experience and new classification within the
enterprise’s value proposition. By understanding how to craft the collaborative
customer experience and better engage the customer, next generation businesses
will be able to increase profits while improving their marketing efficiency and
customer satisfaction.