Operational Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Business & Decision is your expert in transforming your product oriented organisation to higher degree performance via implementation of customer focussed processes. The objective is to maximize the economical value of client relationships. Your operational CRM system is one of the key elements to success.

Definition

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer information. Operational CRM systems help companies to interact and to communicate with customers or prospects across several channels via customer-facing business applications.The objective of CRM is to facilitate, rationalize and pilot the commercial action, in order to raise the ratio between on the one hand the commercial investment and on the other hand the volume and the relevance of the concluded businesses. This objective is achieved when the customer is happy and faithful and when the response to the prospective customer is appropriate to its needs. It is thus necessary to bring in real time the complete knowledge of its prospects or its customers to commercial personnel, to support the commercial processes of the company.

The Business & Decision approach to operational CRM includes state-of-the-art implementations of standard applications such as sales force automation, marketing automation and service management . Development of these applications will increase the efficiency of the sales force, it will optimize the return on investment of marketing campaigns and it will increase customer satisfaction.

Sales Force Automation (SFA)

One of the key elements to success of your operational CRM system is Sales Force Automation

Our Consulting Offer

Business & Decision's consultants work in close partnerships with software tool vendors to implement sales force automation tools. These sales force automation implementations automate some of a company's critical sales and sales force management tasks, such as forecasting, sales administration, tracking customer preferences and demographics, lead management, account management, contact management and quote management.

The implementation of sales force automation tools in a company will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales force. As a result, the sales force will become more productive and the return on investment of the commercial effort will increase. Furthermore, as communication between sales management and sales force is well-supported by the implemented system, sales management response times will decrease which will make the company more alert and agile. Finally, if the information obtained and analyzed with the system is used to create a product that matches or exceeds customer expectations, and the sales staff uses the system to service customers more expertly and diligently, then customer satisfaction will increase.

In sum, state-of-the-art implementation of a sales force automation tool will yield a competitive advantage for a company because the interaction with customers is managed in an intelligent way.

 

Marketing Automation

One of the key elements to success of your operational CRM system is Marketing Automation.

In companies with a large mass of customers, setting up and conducting marketing campaigns is an activity that may take a lot of resources. By automating business processes involved in campaign management, one can considerably improve the effectiveness of campaigns and optimize the return on investment. First, marketing automation tools allow to automate the creation and execution of campaigns which may reduce the cost of the set up and decrease the number of errors. Second, by including results from analytical CRM one may improve the targeting of customers for a specific campaign, which will increase the response rates. Third, marketing automation tools allow to collect and analyze the responses of each campaign, which is crucial to evaluate the success of the campaign and to learn from ones actions. Finally, the recorded responses can be used to refresh the customer database.

An important challenge of campaign management is to optimize the commercial effort made in distinct campaigns across customers. Marketing automation tools allow to include business rules to ensure that customers are not too often contacted in a certain period and to optimize the spread of commercial offers across customers, for instance by calculating the next best offer for each customer.

In addition, in order to be able to learn from ones actions, the Business & Decision approach uses experimental design and sample size calculations to decide on design and complexity of a marketing campaign. In this way, the effect of contacting customers via a particular channel or with a specific message can be tested afterwards.

Service Management

One of the key elements to success of your operational CRM system is Service Management.

Our Consulting Offer

Business & Decision's consultants work in close partnerships with software tool vendors to implement service management tools. These service management implementations will create fast, reliable and efficient customer service support and deliver substantial benefits for the companies. They enable agents to handle incidents and requests seamlessly across all communication channels.

The Servicing application will present a comprehensive view on the critical customer information and a complete history of all interactions with the customer.

Service Centre Agents will improve overall service and customer relationship by:

• Better capturing and tracking customer incidents and requests
• Providing better and accurate assistance to the customer
• Routing incident to the right agent or department
• Accessing Knowledge Bases
• Reducing resolution time
• ...

Service Centre Managers will also gain from the tool by having the ability to better monitor the incidents, manage Service Level Agreement (SLA) or the workload of Service Agents.

Technologies such as Computer Telephony Integration (which provides caller information to agent automatically), Automatic Email Response (which responds automatically to customer emails) or real-time customer self-service via portal (which allows the customer to initiate and follow-up incident, to get access to Frequently Asked Questions...) can drastically enhance the quality of customer services.

In conclusion, with an optimal service management implementation, business can reduce costs while increasing service efficiency and improving retention through customer satisfaction.