Auditing

Article: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

In today's competitive climate many businesses are finding that any advantages they try to establish through their core products and services are quickly eroded as others mimic them. Since leadership by such means is becoming increasingly transitory, businesses are seriously looking at other strategies by which to differentiate themselves from their competitors. High on their agenda is customer relationship management - the next stage of Web-based competition.

Customer relations are the interactions a customer has with a company's products, people, and processes. This is the feel-good factor that is generated by the customer being treated with courtesy and attention at all points of their contact with a company and which motivates him or her to act as a salesperson on your behalf, by recommending your company to friends and relatives. While all companies benefit from cultivating a friendly rapport with their customers, it is the e-business that must employ innovative management tactics to compete internationally.

The Web allows us for the first time ever, to have a real chance to get close to our customers, in real time. The customer relationship market-of-one trend - where businesses can tailor their offer to an individual - is today a keen topic of conversation. But there hasn't been a medium intimate or immediate enough to achieve it - until now. However, it requires discipline to create a good Web site. Part of that discipline is communicating with customers and effectively translating their needs, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours into the requisite Web site experience.

The Web is an active medium. Web sites are places where customers can click on objects to go to different places, enter information and receive results and feedback. This means that we have to anticipate and understand their unpredictable behaviour. Customer behaviour is a complex issue because everybody behaves differently, which means that we have to make some informed guesses about what people want to do on our Web sites and how they came to be there; and then we have to respond appropriately.

In the world of traditional marketing, we're used to defining our target audiences and selecting media to reach them. This doesn't really work on the Web because we have far less control over who sees our Web sites. Creating customer-effective Web sites is obviously a multifaceted endeavour. Many skills are needed to understand the complexities of customer behaviour and how to translate customer behaviour into effective interface design and development on many levels.

Creating customer-effective Web sites is clearly a team effort within and across businesses, strategists, researchers, and their customers. A business is responsible for understanding it's customers' service requirements and providing its suppliers with a good description of what customers need to achieve as a result of visiting its Web site. The business should also provide the overall strategy and direction for how it wishes to manage customers via the Web in the short and long term. From there, the business is responsible for providing the content that needs to be on the Web site along with guidelines on how this information should be structured.

As soon as customers access a Web site, they expect to experience something superior; they expect businesses to apply up to date technology to enhance their service experience and to help them personally, to get things done. Customers want to seek out pertinent information and ask questions, evaluate alternatives, make choices, and make things happen as quickly as they can once they've made up their minds. Moreover, once they've made a decision, they want to be kept in the loop, which includes evaluating competing businesses and products, selecting products, communicating with e-service providers, seeking help to resolve a problem online or finding out where to go, providing feedback and staying tuned as e-customers.

An effective strategy to initiate customer relationship management is to stop thinking of your customers as "targets", or adversaries. Start paying attention to the individual perspectives and needs of each customer, one at a time, rather than just paying attention to the aggregate needs or opinions of a market segment or group. By concentrating on each individual customer, you'll be able to help each get what he or she wants from your product or service. Don't even consider implementing a one-customer-at-a-time program, without first having a quality product and quality service firmly in place. A customer marketing strategy requires a level of product and service quality that will generate satisfied customers, who will then become happy repeat purchasers. As a Webmaster, you must be ultimately involved in product and service quality, provide effective content and constant feedback to the production department, so as to be able to keep your customers coming back for more.

Everything we offer on the Web is subject to higher expectations because customers have to wait for it. On the Internet we have to wait for things to download; slow download speed is still rated by customers as the biggest negative in their experience of the Web. Customers generally hate it when they wait for a page to download and then find there's very little on it. Download time also makes customers more sensitive to time wasting. Another common frustration is taking one path to find information and then taking another, only to find yourself receiving exactly the same information. Customers need to make an informed decision of whether or not it is worth their while to head down a particular path or partake in a particular process. The more we can tell customers about the consequences of their actions, the better, and "telling" a customer what's going to happen, or is happening, will involve written and visual cues. Increasingly, information technology is allowing us to "informationalize" our products, which serves as a way to create a collaboration opportunity with individual customers. The evolution of electronic service has been swift and convincing. Businesses have adopted Web technologies and so have customers.

To deepen your relationship with an individual consumer, you must first learn about and eliminate any obstacles in the way of this particular person's continued happy patronage. A user burned by an unsatisfying site, such as a slow download, will click away. Just because a site is not poor in quality does not mean it can't be improved, so as to better meet the particular needs of an individual set of customers. Customers rarely take the time to communicate with you, and when they do, it is almost always a complaint. This means the vast majority of customer-initiated conversations with a marketer revolve around perceived problems with product or service quality. When a customer complains, he or she is presenting you with an opportunity to collaborate in solving the problem. If you are ready for this, you can earn not only this customer's loyalty but also the loyalty of every friend, colleague, or relative he recommends to you, instead of complaining about you. Build in some form of information that will provide both you and your customer with a reason for continuing your relationship.

Think about all the ways you have for talking to your customers and prospective customers. You can convey an immense amount of information to your users, through content, links, etc. Video clips, images, newsletter, e-mail, chat rooms, bulletin boards -- All these tools make it a cinch to send messages and information to customers. But just how do you talk individually with customers, one at a time, except through expensive and time-consuming mail?

Never forget that every customer and prospective customer of yours is a human being - an organic, intelligent individual with a constantly evolving set of attitudes and opinions. Stop thinking in terms of audiences as faceless masses. When defining your customer service requirements, ask yourself - What is our e-service offering? How do we deliver integrated customer service? What stance will we take in relation to service fundamentals such as what we remember about e-customers, how we identify customers, and what service processes we support and how.

Every piece of content, functionality and design, should be complete and have a clear purpose. Make the results of interactions, such as registration, very clear to e-customers. Never ask for information without stating what the e-customer will get in return, especially if some e-customers are excluded or a significant time investment is required. Make it easy for e-customers to go straight to important parts of a Web site, such as those related to frequently required service requests. Provide a centralized, consistent and helpful navigation system that doesn't send e-customers off to disparate sub-sites. Always show e-customers where they are, where they've been and where they can go. Whenever Web sites offer selection criteria to e-customers, there is a risk the criteria will be wrong or incomplete. E-customers should have as much control as possible over what content they receive in relation to certain criteria. Use the interactivity of the Web to layer the delivery of information so that e-customers don't get overloaded with more information than they need at one time. If e-customers have important relationships with people in business, they will expect that to carry over to their Web sites. This is particularly relevant in the case of business-to-business relationships.

Words by Theresa Lütge-Smith