Various points of contact with customers, such as marketing, technical support, customer service and contract negotiation, become streamlined. The objective is to develop a total relationship with the customer that goes beyond the immediate transaction, or even set of transactions (Anderson & Kerr, 2002)
Customer retention is improved through CRM techniques in a number of ways. CRM tactics often emphasize regular contact (Ghavami & Olyaei, 2006)
This model suggests that there are six main markets that are the focal point of an organization's relationship marketing efforts. These are customer markets, internal markets, suppler & alliance markets, recruitment markets, influence markets and referral markets (Peck, Christopher & Payne, 1999)
The marketing function is enhanced through this relationship building, because it allows the company to better control the messages it sends to the marketplace, and better identify all of the opportunities that are present. By carefully developing and implementing plans for all stakeholder markets, the company is able to gain insight into all of the conditions, constraints and opportunities in the marketplace (Payne, Ballantyne & Christopher, 2005)
In aggregate social networks are bringing an entirely new level of insight and intelligence into how permission marketing, information acquisition and e-commerce strategies can be accomplished. The highest-performing marketing and sales organizations have successfully integrated the intelligence and insight gained from social networks via analytics and customer listening systems to better tailor selling, product and services strategies (Bampo, Ewing, Mather, Stewart, Wallace, 2008)
The intent of this analysis is to analyze and evaluate how social networks are completely re-ordering the nature of customer relationships. The nascent yet very rapid growth of Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM), which is the combining of social networking-based prospect and customer information with the more structured and mature traditional CRM platforms is serving as the basis for many company's strategies in permission marketing, information acquisition and e-commerce strategies (Cooke, Buckley, 2008)
The intent of this analysis is to analyze and evaluate how social networks are completely re-ordering the nature of customer relationships. The nascent yet very rapid growth of Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM), which is the combining of social networking-based prospect and customer information with the more structured and mature traditional CRM platforms is serving as the basis for many company's strategies in permission marketing, information acquisition and e-commerce strategies (Cooke, Buckley, 2008)
What's needed for marketers to drive greater value from social networks is the ability to listen, create trust and sustain strong communication with prospects, customers and stakeholders throughout their spheres of influence. Marketers from both Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies have the potential to completely revolutionize their marketing, selling, service and long-term profitability by concentrating on these fundamentals (Doyle, 2007)
The best practices of creating a very open, transparent and responsive level of communication throughout social media channels and across social networks permeate the companies getting the best results from these strategies. Consequently, their efforts at permission marketing, customer information acquisition and broader e-commerce strategies are significantly more successful (Harris, Rae, 2009)
Each of these companies have entire staffs dedicated to supporting their social CRM efforts and strategies, while also integrating unique customer data, managing ongoing marketing campaigns and responding to customer service requests that are initiated over social media channels. The net effect of this approach has been to galvanize the effectiveness of these social media channels for these companies (Jones, 2002)
Using database marketing strategies these companies will also concentrate their efforts on creating segmentation models, defining statistical and econometric models for defining how to acquire new customers, and also determine the best possible strategies for attaining customer retention. Given the depth and breadth of analytical support data marts, databases and the advent of Big Data are offering these software companies, they are gaining more insights than ever into what drives the decision to purchase their software (McClymont, Jocumsen, 2003)
One of the most powerful for accomplishing these tasks happens to also be free to use. Google Analytics is free, has extensive support for tracking customer visits to a site, can provide real-time updates on which areas of a site are delivering the greater value for navigation and also easily can measure the time spent on a website by a given customer (Perez, 2007)
What's needed is more of a focus on making all elements integral to a common, unified customer-centric strategy based on trust. Figure 3: Social CRM and E-Commerce Maturation Levels, 2012 Based on an analysis of (Cooke, 1994) (Doyle, 2007) (Harris, Rae, 2009) (Jones, 2002) (Plaza, 2010) Question 2: Describe and illustrate what you consider to be important tools used to measure customer visits to a website, enable customer navigation around a website, and measure customer time spent on the website
What's needed is more of a focus on making all elements integral to a common, unified customer-centric strategy based on trust. Figure 3: Social CRM and E-Commerce Maturation Levels, 2012 Based on an analysis of (Cooke, 1994) (Doyle, 2007) (Harris, Rae, 2009) (Jones, 2002) (Plaza, 2010) Question 2: Describe and illustrate what you consider to be important tools used to measure customer visits to a website, enable customer navigation around a website, and measure customer time spent on the website
How all this impacts e-commerce is that it forces organizations to create a much more unified customer management strategy, one that is both information- and process-integrated for the greatest possible impact. Creating e-commerce strategies that fully capitalize social networks, permission marketing and customer information acquisition require very high levels of system integration as well (Qin, Kim, Hsu, Tan, 2011)
While many analyses of these three approaches to marketing center on their static nature, in reality they are most effectively used as part of a broader ecosystem and focus on attaining challenging marketing and selling goals. In assessing and defining the differences between database, direct and relationship marketing, the selling strategies for B2B-oriented products are used, specifically enterprise software (Tapp, 2001)
The more diverse the product strategy of a given company, the more likely database marketing, direct marketing and relationship marketing will be used in conjunction with each other to plan and execute selling and service strategies. There are many differences between each of these three components, yet all are unified when put into place from a customer lifecycle management perspective (Wehmeyer, 2005)
At this stage, the authors once again argue the possibility of CRM to represent a business philosophy through the benchmarking role it would play within the company. Creating, maintaining and expanding -- these three words imply that Customer Relationship Management is a cyclic process of analyzing and utilizing customer data in a means that attracts new customers and also consolidates the relations with the already existent customers (Andersen and Kerr)
5. Another simplistic definition is offered by Dyche (2002), who argues that Customer Relationship Management represents "the infrastructure that enables the delineation of and increase in customer value, and the correct means by which to motivate valuable customers to remain loyal - indeed to buy again" (Dyche, p
(4) Finally, at the fourth level, the company applies the lessons previously learnt to improve its interaction with the customer and to increase the company's sales levels. It has to be mentioned that after relations are established, the company constructs new interactions with the clients, revealing as such the cyclic character of the electronic Customer Relationship Management process (Jacko, Stephanidis and Harris)