Tailoring CRM solutions

25 Jan 2011

As consumers resist the mass-media messaging of traditional marketing, campaign effectiveness and productivity have decreased. Today's CRM solutions need to offer business-specific solutions for defined vertical markets by offering intelligent tools that help anticipate customer's needs to deliver the right products and services they want, when they want them.

"Our customers have to be able to communicate with their clients in ways that they understand and that are meaningful to them," says Jane Thomson, MD of Softworx, an EOH company and Infor reseller. "You need to be able to offer customers a CRM solution that fits and understands the basic issues that pertain to their industry. One size doesn't fit all: vertical CRM is the answer."

Business-specific CRM solutions enable companies to achieve competitive differentiation in several ways:

Speeds time to market: Generate new opportunities efficiently without wasting resources through shorter sales cycles
Increased bundle penetration: Optimise the potential of existing customer relationships by selling bundled offerings that minimise churn and maximise revenue
Reduces churn and increases customer profitability: Utilise churn-detection models to identify at-risk customers and proactively build offers to retain them
Maximises your technology investment: Augment your existing front- and back-end systems and leverage your existing technology investment without additional IT outlay
Fosters flexibility: Increase your strength and resistance to market threats through the use of an open, adaptable technology for a flexible business infrastructure.

To achieve the above, companies need to implement a CRM solution with applications that enable them to communicate with customers more frequently and effectively by providing greater insight into a customer's needs and buying patterns, offering an increased ability to act on that insight.

Generic solutions that try to capture the entire market's wants and needs into a single view lead only to more unread email and unanswered calls. An intelligent CRM solution will break down the traditional methods of sales, service and marketing and usher in a new era of highly targeted campaigns based on the specific needs of different verticals and customers.

"Customers want tailored services faster than ever before and they want to feel as if they are your most valuable asset," she concludes.