Name: Connected CRM
Rating: 4.1 (36 reviews)
Author: David S. Williams

What’s in it for me? Learn how to make customer centricity the core of your business.

CRM is one of those acronyms many have heard of but not understood. Short for Customer Relationship Management, CRM is an approach to improving business relationships with customers by analyzing data about a consumer’s history with a company in order to drive sales growth. The concept has been around for decades, but with new technology come new ways of interacting with consumers. Surely this impacts CRM too?

Of course it does. Connected CRM is a method for engaging customers in your business and putting them at the forefront of your business strategy. Let’s explore these concepts and the ways in which they can become lodestones for companies in the future.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

why different channels for customer contact should address different customer needs;
how the ads for iPhone 6s are a good example of customer engagement; and
why a focus group attended by all parts of a company will give better customer insight.

In the digital age, we need to engage customers instead of just showing them ads.

In the twenty-first century, people the world over can buy countless varieties of products online instead of visiting real stores. But this isolates customers from marketers, forcing marketers to find new ways of reconnecting with their audience.

What exactly does this mean?

It means that today’s ads need to go beyond promoting the latest products. They need to engage the customer.

At the moment, many things come between the customer and the company. For example, in online shopping there’s a lack of communication; the customer’s reactions are hidden behind screens, so it’s hard to ascertain how they feel.

Then there are also occasions when the problem is too much communication.

We see so many ads throughout the day that they don’t even affect us anymore. That’s why ads need to go beyond just communicating and really draw us in. An example of an engaging ad is the iPhone 6 campaign, which displayed iPhone users’ own photos. This triggered engagement because everyone who saw it felt they could take great photos with their own iPhones.

There are also trends that make it easier to reconnect with customers. One thing that helps customer engagement is the modern economy’s shift toward platform marketing, as on Amazon or Ebay.

When someone buys something on your platform, like a cookbook, you could collect that data and use it to target them with food-related ads. However, when your competitors also have powerful platforms, you need to develop more and more sophisticated ways of interacting with your potential customers. So while platform marketing offers the chance to amass loyal customers, actually doing so presents a considerable challenge.

Another way of reconnecting with customers is to use personalization. But don’t think that just calling a customer by their first name will suffice. Instead, you should group customers into segments, with each segment representing a certain kind of behavior. Then, by preparing messages for each segment at a frequency that is neither too pushy nor too shy, you can guarantee a high level of personalization for your customers.

Connected CRM is the fusion of business strategy and customer-centricity.

Any enterprise can be analyzed from two main perspectives: the customer side, which includes the target audience, their age, demographic, and so on, and the business side, which includes the company’s organization, its financial management, etcetera. Both sides need to be well nurtured in a successful business. So how can we directly address customers’ values while building a great business?

By using Connected CRM or cCRM.

Decentralize customer strategies and shape your brand from the customer’s point of view.

Think about a company you feel takes care of your needs. How exactly do you communicate with them? Chances are it depends on the medium you use, whether it’s emails, phone or face-to-face. So why is that?

Because companies that communicate well use a decentralized customer strategy. This means engaging the customer according to the channel being used. While, for example, emails and phone calls tend to be formal, Facebook affords a more casual method of communication. These channels should address different aspects of the customer’s needs in a complementary way.

Key ideas in Connected CRM

About the Author

David Williams is the CEO of performance marketing agency Merkle. He is a frequent speaker at industry events and has written numerous articles and white papers on database marketing and analytics, customer relationship marketing and marketing technology.