Tag: University of Mumbai BMS Notes

Customer care departments take care of different functionalities, whether the task is servicing customers or providing information on some small subject matter. With so much of work available in hand, it becomes difficult to manage call traffic during peak hours. Assuring that each time the call lands at the right party is a way to manage difficult tasks and in order to reach the optimum level of customer satisfaction, it becomes mandatory for call centers to manage their call routing strategies.

Routing strategies have led to a lot of intriguing questions like, How do you transfer your customers’ call to the right person as quickly as possible? How do you take care of the long hold time, customer frustration or defection of your customers to competition? How do you ensure first call resolution?

Call routing is an important part of any efficient customer service strategy. By directing calls to the right department on the first go, the level of customer satisfaction increases with overall reduction in the operating cost. However, call routing is considered as a strategic tool in the business environment, if done properly and efficiently.

Call Routing Strategies to Improve Customer Experience

Routing By IVR: Call routing by IVR is among the most common and the most famous routing methods followed by organizations. IVR allows customers to interact with the organization through telephone keypad or speech interaction. The IVR systems can respond with prerecorded or dynamically generated audio to further direct users on how to proceed for their query. Routing through IVR is most demanded in lead generation businesses and contact centers. This strategy is especially good for lead generation businesses and call centers.

Direct Routing: Organizations looking towards building direct relationship with customers or having a basic approach to customer service are mostly involved in direct routing strategies. Customers are provided with the direct number of the particular department they intend to call. For example: If a customer wants to speak to the sales department, there is a direct number for the sales department. Likewise, there are different numbers for different departments. This ensures that the first connect is to the right department, thereby welcoming more sales closure and higher success rate. But usually the wait time in this strategy is longer if the agent or the rep is busy on another call.

Skill-Based Routing: Selecting this strategy for your organization may save customers from long wait time or frustration during service calls. The customer experience can be improved by matching the highest skilled agent available to handle each call. A successful skills-based routing strategy increases agents’ efficiency by allowing them to use personal knowledge and experience to answer customer’s query. This reduces the average call handling time per agent, leading to higher first call resolution with improved customer satisfaction rate.

Routing by Caller ID: This routing strategy allows you to put some intelligence in the routing system. The phone numbers of certain customers can be recorded as per the urgency of their subject matter. Each customer can be allotted a unique caller ID. Whenever the customer calls, the call gets automatically routed to the most appropriate agent depending on the last conversation or recorded information in the CRM. For instance, if the contract of a certain customer is expiring; the next time the customer rings the department, the call can will directly land to the agent who specializes in retention of existing customers.

Database Integration Routing: Service calls are very crucial when it comes to retaining customers. By integrating the call routing with the customer database, agents can easily look up at the history of the previous conversations and can accordingly take smart and useful decisions. For example: if the caller is an existing customer, route the call to the support department. If the caller is a new customer, route the call to the inquiry or sales department.

Business Rules Routing: Keeping specific business objectives in mind, organizations can align their routing strategies with their business goals. Once the ACD and other applications are in place, organizations can use their routing strategy to their specific business needs. For instance, customers with higher value can be routed to a premier agent. Accordingly, a frustrated or an angry customer attempting to discontinue the usage of a particular service can be transferred to the retention department. Obviously, the strategy being used overe here depends on the specific business goals.

Multimedia and multimodal routing: Being consumers, we interact through various channels with our different suppliers. Some suppliers respond perfectly at a particular channel and some do not. The critical routing challenge many organizations now face is how to route multimedia transactions across multiple customer contact channels. The situation gets worse when  multimedia extends its capabilities to multi-modal routing, where a consumer might be calling or texting from a particular device or from a remote location. For eg: Suppose a customer is calling from his ABC phone, the solution has to be process oriented and at the same time the customer ID should be able to map the CRM history of the customer giving each and every detail about the ABC phone helping in the real time decision making. Here, for sure the technology plays an important role but an organization must keep their resources intact to support such new generation of multimedia and multi modal customer transactions taking place.

Percentage Based Routing: An efficient call center manager ensures that the workload is fairly distributed among all the agents. The manager can see on his dashboard the total percentage of calls received per agent and then can accordingly design the routing strategy to minimize the long wait times.

Service and Sales are two very diverse organizational functions. Traditionally, each function needs a different set of core competencies.

The new-age contact center breaks this convention. It has the unique ability to equip and empower a contact center agent with selling skills and techniques that enables him to cross- sell and up-sell products in addition to handling a service call efficiently.

This article underlines some key tips and techniques that can convert the contact center into a Sales Center of Excellence.

There is a rising need across businesses to convert the regular order-taking contact center to revenue-generating profit centers within the next few years. The customer contact center is thus, evolving from being a plain vanilla customer service center to the more advanced, more valuable revenue generating center. The service call, which is the lifeline of the customer contact center, provides immense potential to initiate a sales cycle. Companies are, therefore, making efforts to leverage this channel to provide a next level lift in revenue generation.

In a customer contact center, every customer call is an opportunity which can be effectively leveraged to initiate a sale. The call center agent has the full attention of the customer when he calls in for resolving a problem or a query. It is, therefore, obvious that leveraging inbound calls is a far effective and efficient medium to initiate a sale rather than an outbound sales call.

Consider this: The largest generation today, Generation ‘Y’ with a population of 100 million represents an annual buying power of $1 trillion.

Buyers within this segment of buyers are tech-savvy, indulge in online research before buying and expect expert help when they are ready to buy.

One can thus imagine the potential buying traffic that for various reasons could get diverted to the contact center and generate sales opportunities. However, converting these opportunities into sources of real revenue is where the real challenge lies.

Transforming the regular contact center into a revenue generating Sales Center of Excellence (CoE) requires a methodical and a well-planned approach. The WNS approach to building a Sales Center of Excellence involves:

Understanding the customer life-cycle

Helping the client identify the sales maturity model of the contact center

Suggesting ways and means and charting out a well-defined roadmap to convert the contact center into a Sales Center of Excellence and reduce the Total Cost of Ownership considerably.

Here are 10 tips that can transform the regular contact center into a Sales Center of Excellence:

1. Revamping Your Hiring Engine: Your employee recruitment process should be focused on identifying, selecting and hiring candidates who share a good number of behavioral traits with current strong performers within your contact center. Some of the traits could be:

Interpersonal skills: It is important that a sales person feels natural interacting with people with an ability to adapt to a variety of situations and different personalities

Resilience: The power to pursue objectives with self-motivation and patience

• Capacity to inspire trust
• Ability to quickly identify the critical issues during a conversation
• Ability to negotiate confidently
• Passion and enthusiasm
• Integrity and honesty
• An interest in learning new things

2. Training Contact Center Agents to Sell Effectively: Sales people are not born, they are trained. Training must become a priority to reinforce the sales culture in your contact center. Your contact center agents must be sensitized about being able to effectively use up-selling and cross-selling techniques, for example, offering a new product / service while providing support for an earlier version, or cross-selling an additional product or service. A great service call can become a good sales call, if the contact center agent can put forth a sales-closing question. Introduction of industry / domain interface in training is also an important facet to build a confident pool of resources who could sell better. Training should not be restricted to contact center agents only and must be extended to team managers too.

3.Power Scheduling and Prioritizing: The best agents in your contact center should be earmarked and deployed to attend calls during sales peak times to effectively handle customer queries and at the same time make a sale. Introduction of advanced workforce management solutions is a must to be able to forecast sales peak times and schedule call-handling by the best agents in the call center. In addition, contact centers must also deploy an intelligent call-routing technology with the ability to ‘power prioritize’ calls basis agent and customer profile. Planning and scheduling not only enhances the chances of cross-selling and up-selling, but also bolsters the ability of the contact center’s ability to take care of customer enquiries in a timely manner.

4. Intelligent Incentivization: Sales incentive compensation management is increasingly becoming the key decisive and motivating factor in influencing the contact center sales force to sell and make an impact on business performance. WNS recommends an outcome-based incentive structure with incentives for sales on high margin products, cross-selling of bundled products and revenue generated per transaction.
5. Valuing Feedback: Your contact center agent is your strongest link with your customer; and it pays to inculcate a practiced and sustained behavior of collecting, respecting and valuing the agent’s ideas and feedback.
6. Monetizing Customer Wait Times: Customer wait times on IVR can be effectively utilized by running special promotion announcements when putting the customer on hold. This can be supplemented by fast-tracking customers for ‘deals of the day’ on Websites.
7. Integrating Customer Contact Center with Your Website: Integrating the customer contact center with your website with proactive Web chat options is a great way to improve online customer acquisition and retention. With an advanced Web chat option, one can expect approximately 50 percent reduction in shopping cart abandonment rates.

8.Integrating Social Media with Contact Center: Monitoring your brand on social media and integrating yourcontact center to support customers over social channels and helping key buying decisions of your customers is emerging as a great strategy to ensure better ROI on your social media investments.

9. Ensuring Better Insights with Analytics: There is a growing need to drill out actionable insights from data collected from contact centers. Analytics has the power to fuel sales by providing actionable insights for better customer recovery, loyalty management, product improvement, campaign management and so forth. Speech Analytics platforms are increasingly being seen as a ‘game changer’ for the contact center-sales center segment of business. New approaches in analyzing CSAT and NPS could also be deployed to improve quality of the feedback mechanism.
10. Continuous Benchmarking & Improvement: While, continuous benchmarking should be a contact process to acquire / develop technology that complements and supplements sales within the contact center; use of Six Sigma methodology should be used effectively to improve quality of query handling and enhancing sales.

Web self-service is a type of electronic support (e-support) that allows customers and employees to access information and perform routine tasks over the Internet, without requiring any interaction with a representative of an enterprise. Web self-service is widely used in customer relationship management (CRM) and employee relationship management (ERM).

Web self-service is an online facility that allows users to perform routine tasks over the Internet without the assistance of a support agent such as accessing information like bills, changing profile information or even doing basic troubleshooting for devices and services. When the specific users of a Web self-service portal are employees, this facility is called an employee self-service (ESS) portal, and they can often do things like check their own attendance, request resources, request vacation leaves and even file complaints without the need to contact the manager or an HR representative. If the Web self-service portal is meant to serve customers of a product or service, then this service is called a customer self-service (CSS) portal. Depending on the kind of product or service, customers can do things like checking the remaining balance of their data or mobile plan, paying bills, editing profiles and even accessing knowledge bases for troubleshooting and usage of a device or service.

The definitive feature of a Web self-service portal is the lack of a human agent who interacts with the user. This usually eliminates confusion and frustration on the user’s end as he/she does not need to interact with someone. It can even help an organization save money and retain customers, depending on the quality of the portal.

When the support is specific to online employee interactions, the practice is known as employee self-service (ESS). When it is specific to customers on the Internet, it is called customer self-service (CSS).

For employees and customers, self-service offers 24 hour-a-day support, and immediate access to information without having to wait for an email response or a returned telephone call. Ultimately, the success of Web self-service depends upon the quality and quantity of information available and the ease with which it can be accessed.

Deploying Web self-service applications benefits a company in a variety of ways. The most prominent motivation is the lower cost, as compared with telephone or email service delivered by a company representative.

A more controversial enterprise benefit of self-service is the ability it affords the company to gather personal information about the people who use it. Tracking and analysis software may be used to create a pseudonymous profile of the user for research and targeted marketing purposes.

Benefits of Web-Based Self-Service

When you empower your customers to resolve their pain points, you improve your chances of boosting customer loyalty and advocacy. Additionally, there are a number of benefits that result from web-based self-service which positively impact your business’s bottom line.

1. Save your customer service and support reps valuable time.

When you readily provide answers to your customers’ frequently asked questions and information about how to resolve their own, your reps will have fewer calls, tickets, and emails to respond to.

This saves them valuable time by allowing them to focus on the customers with complex problems instead of those with issues that could be solved with the help of some type of self-service support (e.g. knowledge base article or automated chatbot).

2. Reduce your customer service and support costs.

Web self-service helps you drive customer service and support costs down, too. When you provide the answers and support your customers seek in a way that teaches them, they will be able to solve their problems without the help of reps. Additionally, they’ll learn how to consistently mitigate their challenges on their own time and in turn, you’ll avoid managing a large team of service and support reps that you need to hire and pay.

3. Drive traffic to your website.

Whether you have a self-service portal, help center web page, or both, your business’s web-based self-service will be connected to your website. That means, when someone wants to access your self-service, you gain traffic on your website. This increases the chances of them learning about your products, buying the latest version of your service, contributing to your customer-based community, clicking your CTAs, and following links to your social media sites.

4. Empower and educate your customers.

Empowering and educating your customers will naturally happen when you provide them with web-based self-service this is because you’re allowing them to find the answers and support they need, on their time, without having to speak to a rep. By doing so, you show your customers that you’re their advocates, which helps you build strong relationships and a sense of trust between your brand and customers.

5. Allow for account personalization.

Customers can personalize their account settings in their portals via your website (if you offer self-service portals to customers). Whether it’s their account details, payment method, or overall plan, this information is customizable and viewable within their self-service portal. And depending on the type of self-service portal you offer customers, it might even welcome each customer by their first name when they login to their account.

Account personalization helps self-service systems understand how they can best help specific individuals based on their preferences. For example, a portal may pull up a customer’s previously viewed, or most frequently viewed, resources upon login for quick access to relevant support materials.

Now you might be thinking, “This sounds great, but how do I actually implement web-based self-service for my customers?”. We’ll review the answer to that next.

A script is a written guide produced for agents to assist them with call handling. While they have traditionally been printed booklets, scripts are increasingly incorporated into CRM systems and appear as on-screen prompts. Their content ranges from material that agents are expected to recite verbatim to suggestions on how the agent can maximise interactions.

A call script, a written script entailing correct wording and logic aids, assists an agent in handling a contact. It also assists in the maintenance of focusing on the content of the contact.

Call scripts guarantee consistency across the call center and allow agents to act more naturally and listen to customers as they know they don’t have to worry about remembering what to say next. Call scripts can be easily integrated with telephony and IVR systems in order to provide the agent useful information about the customer and tailor each interaction accordingly.

Scripts are most commonly used by outbound agents in situations where a successful phraseology has been established. This is especially true of cold calling, which often involves skills that are hard to master, like objection handling.

While incoming contacts are sometimes scripted, the inability to predict a customer’s needs makes it harder to produce relevant materials.

The benefits of scripting

Where scripts are deployed, agents are usually graded on script adherence. Adherence is very simple to measure, making the quality control process quicker and easier for coaches to perform. In environments which do not use scripts, coaches must invest time developing more nuanced measures for judging call quality.

Scripting material also guarantees that agents deliver the same service in every interaction. Historical sales data can indicate the points in a conversation at which up-selling is most likely to be successful, and that lesson is passed on to all agents.

Alternatively, some centres use scripts for training only. Agents work from a script until they are familiar enough with the expectations that they no longer need it. They can also work collaboratively to improve processes; by allowing agents to annotate an online copy of the script and then reviewing the suggested changes, development areas can be defined.

Scripting also aids compliance by ensuring that the messages businesses are legally obliged to deliver are delivered with perfect consistency. Some CRM systems will not complete a transaction until it is confirmed that terms and conditions have been read and understood.

Scripting of parts of a call for compliance

In some contact centre environments only parts of a call are scripted for compliance purposes. One of the classic examples of a compliance script is:

“Your home is at risk is you do not keep up with repayments on your mortgage”.

Issues with scripting

Customer service is increasingly seen as a brand differentiator, which undoubtedly benefits from the hiring of talented agents offering a personalised service. While scripting parts of interactions will make agents’ work easier, relying heavily on prepared materials has been shown to reduce engagement.

Scripts may also leave agents less able to adapt to change or help customers whose needs are outside the common experience. Contact centres increasingly seek to vary the duties their agents undertake, recognising that too much repetition limits an employee’s enjoyment of their work. Even minor variations in how information is delivered can contribute to the agent’s sense of autonomy in the workplace.

It also benefits the customer, who experiences a greater sense of value when dealing with a representative they perceive as responding to their situation naturally. Personal investment and spontaneous conversation are the elements that can take interactions from being serviceable to being memorable.

Customer Service Benefits of Call Scripts

There are several reasons companies choose to integrate the use of call scripts into their agent’s day-to-day requirements. If you are considering using call scripts, here are some of the benefits they offer if used properly:

Minimize Human Error

Nobody is perfect but call center scripts can get your agents pretty close! These scripts are a great reference tool to use when agents feel stuck when talking with a customer or just need a refresher on the processes set in place for your calls.

Promote Consistency

You’ve heard the phrase “consistency is key,” and that is completely true. One of the major advantages of call scripts is that they keep the conversations with your customers consistent across the board. It ensures that customers receive consistent responses no matter which agent they are speaking with.

Create Confidence

Agents are more confident when handling a customer’s problem knowing that they have a call script to rely on if they get stuck. Instead of worrying and anticipating how they are going to help the customer, agents are more relaxed and are able to really take the time to listen. Since your call center agents are essentially the face or in this case, the voice of your companies brand it is important that they are confident.

Monitor Call Quality and Performance

By reviewing how your top performing agents handle your calls, you can incorporate some of their best practices into your call center scripts and teach lower performing agents on how to increase their performance. With all of your agents performing their best, it will lead to an overall better experience for your customers.

Integrate Your Systems

Call scripting is easy to integrate with your hosted PBX system and your IVR system so that your agents can easily access customer information and respond to the specific customer needs accordingly.

As a call center manager, you can use call center scripts to get rid of your customers’ perception of this tool. The easiest way to do this is by using call scripting intelligently to increase your customer satisfaction.

A remote call center agent stationed at home or at a satellite center, who connects to the “real” call center using a PC and softphone. The key characteristic of a cyberagent is that the person’s statistics, performance and real-time status be completely transparent to the supervisors at the main center. The fact that they are stationed remotely should be completely irrelevant from the supervisory point of view, which includes the ability to monitor and record calls and screen activity.

Contact center workforce performance programs help achieve significant improvements in service quality and operational efficiency. In addition to ensuring that the right number of agents are performing at the right time, an effective call center workforce management solution will balance three often conflicting demands, service delivery optimization, lowering operating costs and reducing turnover of agents. Call center workforce management solutions also help to improve customer experience management and significantly improve customer support.Basic functions include the forecasting of contact arrival patterns using historical and other information, creating scheduling assignments based on those forecasts, and providing reports on forecasting and scheduling accuracy. Many systems also offer an expanded range of features such as: skill-based and multimedia contact scheduling, intraday reports, agent self-service capabilities, performance tools, schedule adherence monitoring and time-off administration.

Workforce optimization software can help companies of all sizes improve best practices and achieve significant improvements in service quality and operational efficiency. These solutions also aim to improve service delivery, lower operating costs and increase overall agent retention.

Fundamental necessity of effectively managing your service workforce includes the forecasting of contact patterns using historical data. Many systems also offer an expanded range of features including skill-based and multimedia scheduling, intra-day reporting, agent self-service capabilities, schedule monitoring and time-off administration.

Workforce Management Features:

• Improve workforce efficiency: Reduce labor waste, maximize agent scheduling efficiency, match scheduling with skills and requirements, and improve forecast accuracy while maintaining or improving service level objectives.
• Empower your agents: Improve the agent experience by giving your agents a voice in their work schedule. Enable agents to manage preferred hours, include temporary adjustments, offer scheduling and vacation bidding and auto-approve requests.
• Gain confidence in your forecast: Understand the historical accuracy of your forecasts and gain confidence to take action on intra-day adjustments and future schedules. Improve accuracy with automatic tracking aids, receive email notifications & alerts, adapt quickly to unexpected changes.
• Simplify long term planning: Ensure adequate staff is available when needed and proactively plan for any conceivable volume-impacting events. Accommodate unlimited events, leverage “what if” scenario planning, precisely align future staffing needs.

Relationship marketing should not be confused with transactional marketing. It’s not about selling or promotion. It’s about building customer loyalty by understanding and responding to their needs. And, it’s about showing them that you value their business and trust.

Relationship marketing involves finding ways to make two-way communications between you and your customers easy and beneficial. It requires tracking customer activities and providing information, offers and incentives that are tailored to them.

With more and more marketing tools and techniques at the disposal of business owners, relationship marketing is taking on a greater role as they look for ways to distinguish themselves and create memorable and meaningful customer experiences.

Loyalty programs, referral incentives, even seasonal discounts to current customers all go a long way toward building a relationship that stretches beyond the transaction. Offering rewards, helpful tips and specials enables constructive one-to-one relationships that help you create a great experience for your clients and lay the foundation of long-term brand loyalty.

1. Offering returning customers a discount on services.

Everyone loves a good deal. Therefore, when a customer returns to you, it is a good idea to reward them for coming back. This doesn’t have to be a huge discount; it can just be a percentage off of their bill. However, simply acknowledging that you appreciate their business and are thankful they are coming back to you is a great way to encourage loyalty.

2. Giving rewards for references.

Giving your current customers rewards for referring other customers to you is yet another way to show your current customers you appreciate their business. It also helps build up your customer database quickly.

3. Offering updates.

On your Facebook or Twitter page, you can post updates about your business and even your personal life. if you are comfortable with that. This will make your customers feel like they know you. They will have the inside scoop, a behind-the-scenes look at what you are dealing with on any given day. As a result, you suddenly become more human to them. This is important because appearing as a human in their eyes instead of a big, cold, heartless company is key to relationship building. Consequently, it’s crucial to personal branding as well. Updating your social-media accounts or website is a great way to humanize yourself.

4. Really caring about your customers.

Your customers will see through any fake expressions on your part. Therefore, when you aim to build relationships with your customers, be sure that you actually do care about their well-being. By treating your customers well, you will be amazed at how willing they become to support your business.

Building relationships and personal branding are intertwined. You simply can’t have one without the other. Your work to build lasting relationships with your customers will pay dividends in regards to the growth of your personal brand.

Going above and beyond

Going the extra mile creates a positive and lasting memory for your customers. Delighting your customers beyond expectation builds loyalty. Fans who are more than happy to refer your business to their friends and family.

Here are eight simple ways you can add an “extra touch” to your customer experience if within your means:

1. Offer multiple forms of communication; email, telephone, live chat, Twitter, etc
2. Offer custom solutions based on their needs
3. Offer discounts or store credit for their next purchase
4. Include handwritten notes when shipping products
5. Respond personally to social media comments
6. Respond to reviews (both positive and negative)
7. Be proactive in asking for customer feedback
8. Say thank you

Invest in a CRM

Customer relationship management software (or CRM) allows you to record engagement data and collect information about your customers.

A good CRM should include basic customer information (such as contact details), as well as purchase history and interactions with your brand, sales teams and customer support.

This is the true benefit of relationship marketing. It’s not a tactic to generate more customers. It’s about fostering lifelong relationships with customers who trust you. Follow these principles, make them a core part of your business, and you’ll attract lifelong customers:

• Get to know your customers by running events and meeting them face to face
• Reward loyal customers with discounts, and consider building referral programs
• Create useful and interesting content to deliver more value to your audience
• Provide a delightful customer experience, and go above-and-beyond to make them happy
• Implement a CRM system to manage and keep on top of your customer relationships

In short, relationship marketing is about adding value, even when you’re not talking about your product or service. Adding value, and connecting with your audience directly, is how you build a strong brand.

Customer Profitability Analysis is a tool from managerial accounting that shifts the focus from product line profitability to individual customer profitability. Activity Based Costing looks at the various cost drivers to accurately isolate costs and determine a product’s profitability. In contrast, Customer Profitability Analysis is a method of looking at the various activities and expenses incurred in servicing a particular customer. In other words, it focuses on analyzing profit per customer rather than profit per product.

Customer Profitability Analysis (in short CPA) is a management accounting and a credit underwriting method, allowing businesses and lenders to determine the profitability of each customer or segments of customers, by attributing profits and costs to each customer separately. CPA can be applied at the individual customer level (more time consuming, but providing a better understanding of business situation) or at the level of customer aggregates / groups (e.g. grouped by number of transactions, revenues, average transaction size, time since starting business with the customer, distribution channels, etc.).

CPA is a “retrospective” method, which means it analyses past events of different customers, in order to calculate customer profitability for each customer. Equally, research suggests that that credit score does not necessarily impact the lenders’ profitability.

Application of Customer Profitability Analysis

From the given example, the customer profitability of the Individual segment exceeds the SME segment. This insight then supports the company in its strategic decisions. It can shift its focus towards attracting and retaining more customers from the more profitable Individual segment. Alternatively, it can look for cost reduction approaches for its SME segment. Potentially, it can work to redesign its purchasing process in order to reduce the frequency of visits or orders. Otherwise, it can look to charge its customers for additional service visits to shift the weight of the cost from the company to the customer.

Objective

The main purpose of CPA is to provide to organization management with the understanding of each customer profitability. Grouping this information into customer profitability segments, allows the companies to take different, targeted actions and strategies against different profitability segments, having as a target increasing the company’s total profitability. Those companies that understand which customers are more profitable and which are not are “armed with valuable information needed to make successful managerial decision to improve overall organizational profitability”.

CPA allows businesses to take the following key strategic decisions:

• Identify customers’ profiles
• Differentiate customer service activities depending on customer profile (e.g. highly-profitable customers could receive more attention, to ensure high-level satisfaction and loyalty, in order to protect continued business relations);
• Differentiate marketing strategy, depending on customer profile (e.g. implement more aggressive and expensive marketing strategies to high-spenders, while limiting the marketing costs against customers, who spend little and show few signs of spending more in the future);
• Take actions, to maintain or increase customers profitability, including turning unprofitable customers into profitable ones (e.g. decreasing cost to serve, of looking for ways to increase revenue, up to ceasing business relations with unprofitable customers to cut the costs).

Revenue associated to the customer

Revenue differences across customers may differ due to various reasons, including:

• Differences in price charged for a unit a product or service to different customers
• Differences in volumes sold to different customers.
• Differences in product or service specification delivered to different customers.
• Other one-time events, such as bonus events, not directly related to a particular sale transaction.

CPA requires a company to associate all company’s revenue to different customers (sources of revenue), in order to find out revenue associated to each customer. Companies most typically have no trouble finding out the amount of revenue attributed to a particular customer; thus, article will not cover this aspect.

Costs associated to the customer

Customers differ in costs they generate by using company’s resources in a different way. These reasons may include:

• Different amounts of marketing costs may be necessary to strike a deal with different customers
• Differences in used distribution channels / logistics by different customers
• Differences in customer service required by different customers
• Differences in volume of products purchased (production of large volume of a product for a single order can be cheaper that production of the same amount, divided into many orders, requested by many customers)

Limitations / implementation barriers

Using CPA is associated with some difficulties & limitations:

• Most importantly, CPA is a backward-looking tool, meaning it analyses past events, providing results, based on which companies are making their strategic choices. Past however may not always be the determinant of the future, and decisions made based on past events only, could be incorrect if market conditions, or business strategy change;
• The cost of acquisition and customer service may be difficult to measure;
• Performing ABC or other methods of attributing costs to customers, CPA calculations, outlining distinct strategies towards different groups of customers, communicating internally and implementing those strategies can be a large undertaking for an organization in terms of the resources used and the costs to complete the initiative, requiring specialized knowledge and appropriately developed accounting systems;
• People often feel threatened by change, do not understand it, and are opposed to it within a company (e.g. Commission salespersons will try to protect customers even though they may not be profitable to the company).

Overcoming limitations

There are various strategies which could be used to minimize limitations / implementation barriers to introduce CPA, including the following ones:

• Management needs to be sensitive to required change within the organization and be sure that employees are included in the decision and change processes. Management should seek to ensure employee buy-in, to minimize resistance towards change;
• Management needs to properly set internal incentive model, e.g. rewarding salespeople on the basis of customer profitability, as opposed to revenue generated by the customer;
• To minimize the limitation resulting from the fact, that CPA is a backwards-looking tool, a company could additionally consider implementation of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV is a forward-looking customer profitability estimator, taking CPA as a starting point for calculation. CLV could be used for forecasting of future customer profitability (based not only on historical events, but also proposed marketing strategy, trends in customer behavior, etc.).

Customers as Strangers:

Strangers are those customers who have not yet had any transactions with a firm and may not even be aware of the firm. At the industry level, strangers may be conceptualized as customers who have not yet entered the market, at the firm level, they may include customers of competitors. clearly the firm has no relationship with the customer at this point. Consequently, the firm’s primary goal with these potential customers is to initiate communication with them in order to attract them and acquire their business.

Customers as Acquaintances:

Once customer awareness and trial are achieved, familiarity is established and the customer and the customer and the firm become acquaintances, creating the basis for an exchange relationship. A primary goal for the firm at this stage of the relationship is satisfying the customer. In the acquaintance stage, firms are generally concerned about providing a value proposition to customers comparable with that of competitors. For a customer, an acquaintanceship is effective as long as the customer is relatively satisfied and what is being received in the exchange is perceived as fair value.

Customers as Friends:

As a customer continues to make purchases from a firm and to receive value in the exchange relationship, the firm begins to acquire specific knowledge of the customer’s needs, allowing it to create an offering that directly addresses the customer’s situation. The provision of a unique offering, and thus differential value, transforms the relationship from acquaintance to friendship. A primary goal for firms’ goal for firms at the friendship stage of the relationship is customer retention.

Customers as Partners:

As a customer continues to interact with a firm, the level of trust often deepens and the customer may receive more customized product offerings and interactions. The trust developed in the friendship stage is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a customer firm partnership to develop. That is the creation of trust leads to the creation of commitment and that is the condition necessary for customers to extend the time perspective of a relationship.

When companies connect with customers’ emotions, the payoff can be huge. Consider these examples: After a major bank introduced a credit card for Millennials that was designed to inspire emotional connection, use among the segment increased by 70% and new account growth rose by 40%. Within a year of launching products and messaging to maximize emotional connection, a leading household cleaner turned market share losses into double-digit growth. And when a nationwide apparel retailer reoriented its merchandising and customer experience to its most emotionally connected customer segments, same-store sales growth accelerated more than threefold.

Given the enormous opportunity to create new value, companies should pursue emotional connections as a science and a strategy. But for most, building these connections is more guesswork than science. At the end of the day they have little idea what really works and whether their efforts have produced the desired results.

Our research across hundreds of brands in dozens of categories shows that it’s possible to rigorously measure and strategically target the feelings that drive customers’ behavior. We call them “emotional motivators.” They provide a better gauge of customers’ future value to a firm than any other metric, including brand awareness and customer satisfaction, and can be an important new source of growth and profitability.

At the most basic level, any company can begin a structured process of learning about its customers’ emotional motivators and conducting experiments to leverage them, later scaling up from there. At the other end of the spectrum, firms can invest in deep research and big data analytics or engage consultancies with specific expertise. Companies in financial services, retail, health care, and technology are now using a detailed understanding of emotional connection to attract and retain the most valuable customers. The most sophisticated firms are making emotional connection part of a broad strategy that involves every function in the value chain, from product development and marketing to sales and service.

Although brands may be liked or trusted, most fail to align themselves with the emotions that drive their customers’ most profitable behaviors. Some brands by nature have an easier time making such connections, but a company doesn’t have to be born with the emotional DNA of Disney or Apple to succeed. Even a cleaning product or a canned food can forge powerful connections.

The process, in brief, looks like this: Applying big data analytics to detailed customer-data sets, we first identify the emotional motivators for a category’s most valuable customers. High-value automobile customers, for example, might want to “feel a sense of belonging” and “feel a sense of freedom.” Next we use statistical modeling to look at a large number of customers and brands, comparing survey results about people’s emotional motivators with their purchase behavior and identifying spikes in buying that are associated with specific motivators. This reveals which motivators generate the most-profitable customer behaviors in the category. We then quantify the current and potential value of motivators for a given brand and help identify strategies to leverage them.

The model also allows us to compare the value of making strong emotional connections with that of scoring well on standard customer metrics such as satisfaction and brand differentiation, thus highlighting the potential gains from looking beyond traditional measures. We find that customers become more valuable at each step of a predictable “emotional connection pathway” as they transition from (1) being unconnected to (2) being highly satisfied to (3) perceiving brand differentiation to (4) being fully connected.

Although customers exhibit increasing connection at each step, their value increases dramatically when they reach the fourth step: Fully connected customers are 52% more valuable, on average, than those who are just highly satisfied. In fact, their relative value is striking across a variety of metrics, such as purchases and frequency of use.

Emotional motivators for a given brand or industry vary with a person’s position in the customer journey.

In banking, the desire to “feel secure” is a critical motivator when attracting and retaining customers early on. When cross-selling products later, the wish to “succeed in life” becomes more important. To maximize results, companies must align their emotional-connection strategies with their specific customer-engagement objectives acquisition, retention, cross-selling, and so on.

1. Target connected customers.

We set out to answer two basic questions: How valuable were the retailer’s fully connected customers, and could the company attract more of them? We used statistical techniques to measure the strength of customers’ emotional connections with the retailer and with its competitors. The process began with surveys to discern how consumers related to key motivators in the category and with analysis to see which motivators best predicted purchase behavior. We then modeled the financial impact of building emotional connections with customers at each step on the pathway from unconnected to fully connected.

Our analysis showed that although fully connected customers constituted just 22% of customers in the category, they accounted for 37% of revenue and they spent, on average, twice as much annually ($400) as highly satisfied customers. Enhancing emotional connection could be a viable growth strategy if the retailer could attract fully connected customers from competitors, transform satisfied customers into fully connected ones, or both.

2. Quantify key motivators.

Next, by analyzing tens of thousands of Flourishers across the category, we quantified the impact of more than 40 motivators on the group’s purchasing, spending, loyalty, and advocacy. We identified the most important category motivators—the ones that bore the strongest relationship to purchases and assessed the retailer’s competitive position in each. The financial analysis and modeling showed that further investments to strengthen the customer experience around the desires to “feel a sense of belonging,” “feel a sense of thrill,” and “feel a sense of freedom” the motivators driving category purchase behavior and for which the retailer already had the strongest position were likely to yield the highest ROI. Those motivators therefore became the focus of specific customer-experience investments.

3. Optimize investments across functions.

To maximize opportunities from emotional connection, companies must look beyond the marketing department. The retailer examined every function and customer touchpoint to find ways to enhance high-ROI emotional motivators. This brought four major investment areas into focus: stores, online and omnichannel experiences, merchandising, and message targeting.

Merchandising.

Merchandise selection, from the broad category level to specific labels, can be optimized to drive emotional connection. The retailer now tracks the purchasing habits of Flourishers nationwide through point-of-sale data collected from hundreds of retailers by independent research companies. By applying the Flourisher segmentation to these POS databases, it has modeled the segment’s purchase behavior across more than 20 product categories and 100 labels and learned which of the approximately 10 competitive retailers these consumers buy from. The resulting insights have exposed gaps in merchandise important to Flourishers, and the retailer is working with its manufacturers to rebalance its mix.

Message targeting

Having identified its Flourisher customers, the retailer can now send them personalized messages designed to resonate with the emotional motivators that drive behavior at each stage of the customer journey. For example, when Flourishers are initially considering the retailer, “having fun” while shopping is paramount. At the point of purchase, “helps me feel creative” emerges as key. Working from such insights, the retailer has developed a series of messages targeting Flourishers and timed according to their position in the journey: A rules engine sends out e-mails tailored to browsing, transacting, and servicing interactions. Response rates to this direct-marketing campaign are 40% to 210% higher than historical averages.

The Management Imperative

Embracing an emotional-connection strategy across the organization requires deep customer insights, analytical capabilities, and, above all, a managerial commitment to align the organization with the new way of thinking. It’s important that marketing not hoard the strategy as “its” domain (although the function can and should use emotional connection to demonstrate the direct financial impact of its spending). Instead, marketing must partner with other functions, teaching and socializing emotional connection. The retailer we profiled now uses emotional connection to drive alignment across the operations management team, the C-suite, and the boardroom. At the outset the CEO identified emotional connection as a strategy to restore profitable growth. The CFO and the chief strategy officer then “sized the financial prize,” leading the heads of marketing, stores, customer experience, and merchandising to collaborate on an integrated strategy.

The advent of big data analytics brings clarity, discipline, and rigor to companies’ long-held desire to connect with the customer emotions that truly matter. Emotional connections no longer have to be a mystery they can be a new source of real competitive advantage and growth.

CRM helps the business in closing deals faster through quicker and more efficient responses to customer needs and customer information. The organizations have to implement CRM Systems effectively.

Customer Loyalty:

Firms can gain loyalty of the customer by regularly understanding their needs and meeting their needs. Customer develops regular association with the firm due to the products and marketing style of a firm that is of customers liking.

1. A CRM system consists of a historical view and analysis of all the acquired or to be acquired customers. This helps in reduced searching and correlating customers and to foresee customer needs effectively and increase business.
2. CRM contains each and every bit of details of a customer, hence it is very easy to track a customer accordingly and can be used to determine which customer can be profitable and which not.
3. In CRM system, customers are grouped according to different aspects according to the type of business they do or according to physical location and are allocated to different customer managers often called as account managers. This helps in focusing and concentrating on each and every customer separately.
4. A CRM system is not only used to deal with the existing customers but is also useful in acquiring new customers. The process first starts with identifying a customer and maintaining all the corresponding details into the CRM system which is also called an ‘Opportunity of Business’.

The Sales and Field representatives then try getting business out of these customers by sophistically following up with them and converting them into a winning deal. All this is very easily and efficiently done by an integrated CRM system.

5. The strongest aspect of Customer Relationship Management is that it is very cost-effective. The advantage of decently implemented CRM system is that there is very less need of paper and manual work which requires lesser staff to manage and lesser resources to deal with. The technologies used in implementing a CRM system are also very cheap and smooth as compared to the traditional way of business.
6. All the details in CRM system is kept centralized which is available anytime on fingertips. This reduces the process time and increases productivity.
7. Efficiently dealing with all the customers and providing them what they actually need increases the customer satisfaction. This increases the chance of getting more business which ultimately enhances turnover and profit.
8. If the customer is satisfied they will always be loyal to you and will remain in business forever resulting in increasing customer base and ultimately enhancing net growth of business.

Provide Better Customer Service:

CRM system gives advantages such as the ability to personalize relationship with customers. CRM maintains Customer Profiles, there by treating each client as an individual and not as a group. This way every employee can be better informed about each customer’s specific needs and transaction profiles.

Better Customer Service improves the responsiveness and understanding which helps in building Customer loyalty. It also helps the company in getting continuous feedback from the Customers on the Product they have brought.

Increase Customers Revenues:

Regular updation of customer information will help a firm to keep on revising its product and marketing strategy. Adaptation of product and its marketing to match the changing needs of a customer make the organisation customer friendly resulting in increase the sales and revenue.

Discover New Customers:

CRM systems help the organization in identifying potential Customers by keeping a track of the profiles of their existing client, the business can easily come up with a strategy to determine the kind of people they should target so that it returns them maximum revenue.

“Cross Sell” and “Up Sell”:

CRM system facilitates Cross-selling (offering customers complimentary products based on their previous purchases) and Up-Selling (offering customers premium products in the same category) It helps them to gain a better understanding of customers and anticipate their purchases.

For Example- (Cross sell – A Bluetooth head set along with the smart phone and up sell – Surf Detergent has introduced Surf Excel a better-quality product.

It offers a win situation for everyone that is:

1. Customer is benefited as he gets product of his choice.
2. Retailer is benefited as he has less difficulty in selling the product.
3. Manufacturer is benefited due to regular sales.

Benefits

The following are the benefits of adopting CRM processes:

• Develop better communication channels
• Collect customer related data
• Create detailed profiles of individual customers
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Access to customer account history, order information, and customer information at all touch points
• Identify new selling opportunities
• Increased market share and profit margin
• Increased revenues
• More effective reach and marketing
• Improved customer service and support
• Improved response time to customer requests for information
• Enhanced customer loyalty
• Improved ability to meet customer requirements
• Improved quality communication and networking
• Reduced costs of buying and using product and services
• Better stand against global competition

At the most basic level, CRM software consolidates customer information and documents into a single CRM database so business users can more easily access and manage it.

Over time, many additional functions have been added to CRM systems to make them more useful. Some of these functions include recording various customer interactions over email, phone, social media or other channels; depending on system capabilities, automating various workflow automation processes, such as tasks, calendars and alerts; and giving managers the ability to track performance and productivity based on information logged within the system.

• Marketing Automation: CRM tools with marketing automation capabilities can automate repetitive tasks to enhance marketing efforts at different points in the lifecycle. For example, as sales prospects come into the system, it might automatically send the prospects marketing materials, typically via email or social media, with the goal of turning a sales lead into a full-fledged customer.
• Sales force automation: Sales force automation tools track customer interactions and automate certain business functions of the sales cycle that are necessary to follow leads and attract and obtain new customers.
• Contact center automation: Designed to reduce tedious aspects of a contact center agent’s job, contact center automation might include prerecorded audio that assists in customer problem-solving and information dissemination. Various software tools that integrate with the agent’s desktop tools can handle customer requests in order to cut down on the time of calls and to simplify customer service processes.
• Geolocation technology, or location-based services: Some CRM systems include technology that can create geographic marketing campaigns based on customers’ physical locations, sometimes integrating with popular location-based GPS apps. Geolocation technology can also be used as a networking or contact management tool in order to find sales prospects based on a location.
• Workflow automation: CRM systems help businesses optimize processes by streamlining mundane workloads, enabling employees to focus on creative and more high-level tasks.
• Lead management: Sales leads can be tracked through CRM, enabling sales teams to input, track and analyze data for leads in one place.
• Human resource management (HRM): CRM systems help track employee information, such as contact information, performance reviews and benefits within a company. This enables the human resource department to more effectively manage the internal workforce.
• Analytics: Analytics in CRM help create better customer satisfaction rates by analyzing user data and helping create targeted marketing campaigns.
• AI: Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as Salesforce Einstein, have been built into CRM platforms to automate repetitive tasks, identify customer buying patterns to predict future customer behaviors and more.