You are on page 1of 7

NEW TRENDS IN CRM FOR SERVICE SECTOR

Authors Organization Contact Details Email ID

: Amritraj D. Bangera, Anil Kumar B, Vibin M S. : M. S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore : +918123949008, +919538963906, +919986853936. : bangera.amritraj@gmail.com, anil.5898@gmail.com, vibinms@yahoo.co.in

ABSTRACT CRM is a strategy that manages the companys relationship with customers and clients to improve the selling process. It uses modern technology to organize, automate, and control business processes. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new and retain existing customers. Customer relationship management describes a company-wide business strategy including customer-interface departments as well as other departments. For the last 3 decades there has been a substantial shift from primary and secondary sector to the tertiary sector in industrialized countries. The tertiary sector is now the largest sector of the economy. In tertiary sector people offer their knowledge and time to improve productivity and performance. The basic characteristic of this sector is the production of services instead of end products. The service sector is receiving much deserved attention resulting from its inevitable role in a countrys economic development where it is mainly focusing on developing an inbound relationship with the customer, which helps the company in terms of acquiring and retaining the customers. Because service is an intangible good it includes attention, advice, experience and constant interaction. The scope of CRM in service sector is vast where it includes Government, health care, hospitality (restaurants, hotels and casinos), education, banking, insurance, financial, legal, consulting, news media, tourism, retail sales and many more. Thus our objective in this paper is to high light the new and emerging trends of CRM in service sector which is crucial for developing country like India.

Introduction
The process of developing a cooperative and collaborative relationship between the buyers and sellers is called customer relationship management shortly called CRM. CRM aims at focusing all the organizational activities towards creating and maintaining a customer. CRM is a new technique in marketing where the marketer tries to develop long term collaborative relationship with customers to develop them as life time customers. CRM aims to make the customer climb up the ladder of loyalty. CRM is putting your customer at the heart of your business. Today it is more important than ever to build better relationships with your customers as, in this day and age of social media, they now talk to hundreds people at a time. They have a megaphone, making it easier for positive and negative messages to spread fast and wide. Customer Relationship Management once a traditional customer strategy is now making new strides. Organizations are trying to make CRM more appealing to the masses and vendors are make an effort to come up with as many innovations as possible, in order to meet the requirements. CRM is blossoming out at every turn as the new CRM trends take shape and start to succeed. Old traditional methods of CRM are fast being left behind as companies try their best to cater to the client. Its latest trends include a profound integration with customer analytics, business intelligence etc. Traditionally, CRM served mainly to collate customer data like profiles, order history etc. and served to maintain a relationship with the customer and the company. Now however, CRM has the potential to study the data available and offer predictive analysis as well. According to the new trends businesses can watch customers and then go on to suggest what products and services should be offered to them so that the maximum profit is secured.

Phases in CRM
The three phases in which CRM support the relationship between a business and its customers are to: Acquire: CRM can help a business acquire new customers through contact management, selling, and fulfilment. Enhance: web-enabled CRM combined with customer service tools offers customers service from a team of sales and service specialists, which offers customers the convenience of one-stop shopping. Retain: CRM software and databases enable a business to identify and reward its loyal customers and further develop its targeted marketing and relationship marketing initiatives.

Acquire

CRM
Enhance
Growth

Retain

New CRM Trends


Personalization and customization In order to be effective in CRM, companies will seek to know more about its customers and use that insight to talk, engage and interact with their customers more often and more meaningfully in new and innovative ways (including dynamic content, blogs to other social networking).

Branding Branding is more important than ever. Brands have always been and are increasingly becoming a surrogate for value - making brand differentiation all the more critical as generic features continue to propagate in the brand landscape.

Analytical CRM Analytical CRM is fast gaining ground as a hot trend in the CRM industry. Firms are now encouraging their analytical teams to work closer with their customers. They are endeavouring to see what sort of analysis actually matters to the customer through finding out what contributes to their highest satisfaction.

CRM Goes Mobile Another hot trend in the CRM industry is the "mobile" interest. CRM has currently gone mobile and is easily assessable almost anywhere.

Integrated Approach for CRM CRM research shows that this integrated approach to CRM is fast gaining ground and CRM vendors need to ensure that their solutions pay ample heed to this fact. Companies need to take this into account and ensure that their products deliver an integrated CRM solution.

CRM and the Internet CRM's newest forerun is into Internet Technology. This latest trend is fast gaining ground. Here the customers profile details are entered into the system and the search engine goes through corresponding articles and products that pertain to these profiles and gives it back to the organization which uses this information in its customer dealings.

Vertical CRM Vertical CRM solutions are one of the newest trends in the CRM industry. Here the company focus on the fact that the needs of different organizations differ, therefore they try to accommodate these differences through customization, in order to fulfil the individual needs. For instance CRM software that specifically caters to the needs of the legal, financial, management and accounting sectors.

Outsourcing CRM Outsourcing CRM is yet another new trend gaining ground. Sales force leads the pack in this area. The lure in this area is the lower costs involved, contributing to overall profitability.

Midmarket Trends The newest trend in the midmarket is a desire to run licensed CRM applications. The other trends taking shape is that market leaders prefer to opt for partnerships rather than acquisitions. Most midmarket players are going in for partnerships including Sales Net, Net suite etc. CRM research also shows that aside from these CRM trends many midmarkets prefer now to opt for more flexible and customizable CRM.

Challenges
Understanding of CRM CRM is not software. Its a business philosophy. It is a strategy, implemented using a software solution, which typically covers all customer facing departments like sales, marketing, customer service, etc of a company. Hence CRM is a term, collectively used to refer to a combination of strategy & software. Getting Clarity on Objectives What are the set of objectives the company wishes to achieve with CRM should be identified. Ensure that these objectives are listed and define a measurement metrics to be used to access the success of the implementation. Without these, the companies cant access the benefits or the ROI of the CRM system. No Core CRM Team Unlike other software implementations, IT team alone should not be expected to roll out a CRM system. It is very critical for companies to form a core CRM team, which in addition to IT draws participation from Top Management, Senior Executives of Sales, Marketing and Customer Service departments and finally the end-users. Decisions related to the implementation should be discussed in this forum. Product/Service Evaluation Metrics In most companies, investments in IT are need based. With time, this buying pattern results in multiple systems that fragment customer data. While short-listing CRM products/services, it is essential to analyse overall capabilities of the product, in addition to the need driver module. As the company matures in its CRM initiative, the expectation from its CRM system multiplies. As a rule of thumb, consider only those CRM products that offer multiple modules like Sales Force Automation, Marketing Automation, Customer Support & Services, etc. This will enable companies to span horizontally, as requirements evolve.

Getting User Adoption User Adoption is the key for success of any CRM. It is important to design effective training programs in order to provide enough skills and understanding to end users for them to be able to effectively use the system. Ensure that the user interface is kept simple. Consultants often underestimate or miss the motivation required to get the end-users to start using the system. Consider the sales executives; their motivation is to meet the targets to get to the incentive cheque.

Managing the Application Once the CRM has been rolled-out, it is important to re-align the working culture of teams around it. To illustrate, the VP sales direct his sales team to carry excel sheet prints of their pipeline when coming for a review. Here either the report was not configured well in the system, or users have not been updating it enough. Such scenarios need immediate correction or else the CRM system will slowly lose its relevance.

Process Clearly defined processes and their enforcement are critical to the success of any CRM rollout. The objective is to cut out the ambiguity in the system. It is advisable to create a central depositary, accessible to all, which store all the process definitions. Some key processes that need to be defined are Change Management process, Feature re-evaluation process, Success evaluation process, Business flows, etc. Any process implemented via CRM, must map your real-world process and vice-versa.

Finding the Right partner The rate of CRM success considerably goes up with the right solution partner. While strategy consultants are good, it is the solution partner who will make it work. Ideally select a partner who can do both, strategy & implementation. It is important that your partner shares the risks of your implementation. While global knowledgebase is impressive, local issues can often negate these learnings. Work with a vendor who understands local - work culture, technology limitations, and cultural sensitivities and is willing to listen.

Benefits of CRM
The use of a CRM system will confer several advantages to a company: Better Quality - Higher efficiency CRM induces better quality into the product and service thus enhancing the efficiency and the overall performance. Today customers are more quality oriented; the implementation of CRM provides more quality to the products and services they offer. Reduced Costs - Increased Profits Attracting and acquiring new customers is more expensive and time consuming when compared to retaining existing customers. CRM helps in retaining existing customers thus decreases overall cost to the company. Decision Support Better Understanding By retaining the customers and having a good relationship with them helps in understanding their needs and requirements. This in turn recognizes the demand in the market and helps in decision making by the company. Enterprise agility Flexible Management CRM help the overall organization in terms of working and maintaining better relationship with the customer, which provides flexibility to the various departments and increases the companies turn overtime.

Conclusion
CRM entails all aspects of interaction a company has with its customer, whether it is sales or service related; it starts with the foundation of relationship marketing. CRM is a systematic approach towards using information and ongoing dialogue to build long lasting mutually beneficial customer relationship. From the above all available data it is clear that how CRM is placing a vital role in service sector. So, it makes more strengthen this sector.

You might also like