The 4 bases of the CRM Strategy

It is known that the organization's performance increase when there is a well defined CRM Strategy. In this post, I show the bases of the strategy.

The CRM Organization and the CRM Vision

An organization that has the structure and vision that enables, supports, and eases the management of the sustaining customer relationship can be considered a CRM Organization.

In this type of organization, the organizational head has a Customer-Centric vision that becomes a priority and is mandatory for every BU.

A vision is Customer-Centric when the Customer Experience is the center of the CRM Process and it drives the relationships between the organization and the current customers, but also, with potential customers too.

The CRM Process

The process is a consequence of the Sales Process and is nothing but the four main activities that can be associated with the Sales Process (which can have 8 stages or less, depending on the author, here there is one example). 

Awareness: you have to reach your future customers and let them know about your brand and products.

Conversion: if you sold, you converted your lead.

Retention: the main objective of the Customer-Centric vision, support your customers in such a way that they want to buy again, or even more, they want to ...

Loyalty / Referral: be loyal to your brand and let others know about your products.

And there is one activity more (or set of activities) that are part of this CRM Process: the way you use and manage the customer data. For instance, when you do BI Analysis, Customer Segmentation, Customer Profiling, Order Management, Fulfillment Management, Marketing Campaign, Consent Management, etc., you use the customer data.

The CRM Technology

You need applications and technology that can support side by side, the CRM Process. For instance, the following image shows the relationship between the process' stages and some applications or functionalities that are related to each stage.

But there is more to it, it is not only to have a set of silo applications that manage each functional area (and leads to misaligned information about your customers, or worst! shared with your customers).  The applications must also be integrated and work like one transparent and well-oiled piece (from the point of view of the users), where the customer data resides in the same place and is accessed by everyone in the same way.

This set of applications is known as CRM Technology, and we can find three main types: CRM Collaborative Technology, CRM Operational Technology, and CRM Analytical Technology. 

The following image shows the 4 bases working together.

Wrap-up

Since a few years ago, the CRM as a concept, a capability, and a strategy is more and more being analyzed and studied (even from university points of view, not only from business institutions or corporations). This is another point of view. I hope you enjoyed it :-).