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Value Thy CRM

In these times of grave economic uncertainties, organizations need to double their customer focus and leverage CRM systems by engaging more customers to increase profitability By Rajendra Chaudhary

Can you believe this? It took a recession for companies to realize that business would suffer if their customers were unhappy. After all it is customers that keep you in the business. This very thought brought back the focus on CRM. Granted that your CRM can only be as effective as you'd want it to be (because in the end it is only a system run by people and they have to use it), it still needs to provide business users with enough tools and intelligence so that they feel empowered enough to make the right choices for the business, close sales faster and fulfill customer expectations. This is something which is extremely important, more so during a recession when the stakes are really high and the margin for error is very low.

Just ask Pratap Gharge, Vice President & CIO of Bajaj Electricals, one of India's oldest and most respected brands in the luminary and electrical appliances' business and he will give you more examples. The company uses Oracle's Seibel CRM for managing its customer related activities. Implemented as part of company's efforts to modernize its IT, the CRM deployment has already yielded many crucial benefits for the company, said Gharge.

He said that the company faced a lot of discrepancies in fixing the right prices for its consumer durables business. “Due to the extremely competitive nature of the segment, it (pricing) involves constant innovation on how we price our products. Additionally we are also required to run frequently promotional offers and special schemes." He continued, "Earlier product pricing was at the mercy of our people at branch offices that resulted in unfair trade practices—customers who had a good rapport with the local area manager would sometimes get a better deal than the others,” informed Gharge.

However with the implementation of Seibel CRM, Bajaj Electricals has eliminated the problems and completely automated the pricing process through what it calls Dynamic Pricing.

Seibel has a Dynamic Pricing module with predefined price controllers that helpthe company prepare all sorts of prices, special offers, and promotional schemes for its customers. “The system has completely eliminated the disparity in prices which existed earlier and since everything is now taken care of at the head office level, all our customers get treated fairly—this has lead to increased transparency in the system. Additionally it has also helped us save a lot of time for our sales team, which earlier had to spend a lot of time to figure out the right prices for various products,” observed Gharge.

Streamline customer engagements to increase profitability

In the short time that AEGON Religare Life Insurance has existed as a business entity, it has already managed to capture the imagination of the people at large and create a niche for itself in what is an extremely crowded marketplace. According to Srinivasan Iyengar, Director-Information and Operations at AEGON Religare Life Insurance, it would have been a difficult task cracking the market had it not been for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Citing one such example of how the CRM system came in handy Iyengar said, “In order to improve our market presence and grow as a company, we knew that we need to focus on our activities such as campaign management, lead management and case management in order to provide superior services to our customers and build stronger relationships with them.”

Iyengar maintained that the CRM system has proven to be a solution that has essentially empowered the entire organization for conducting business while meeting some rather specific requirements of the company.

For instance it wanted to define specific parameters using it could assess the success of certain marketing campaigns and Microsoft Dynamic CRM helped achieve this goal. Additionally it allowed the company to trace information regarding prospective customers. The Microsoft Dynamic CRM system now automaticaly assigns leads to the correct sales person. It has streamlined business operations (increased workflow) and has gives an integrated view of customers.

Kuoni Travels, the travel house is also a Microsoft Dynamics CRM shop. The company has earned a fairly good reputation of being a technology driven firm, thanks to the efforts of its CIO, Dhiren Savla. As is widely known, 2009 was not exactly the best year for the travel industry and much like other firms in the sector, Kuoni too was affected, albeit only slightly, by the downturn. However, instead of getting into cost cutting mode and sending IT projects to the back burner, the company decided to focus on building internal resiliency by improving operational efficiencies and focusing on customer engagements.

“We had certain local home grown systems with some basic functionalities of CRM which were not giving us the desired results that we wanted from our customer interactions. This prompted us to go for a standard application for CRM that would allow us to focus on customer facing operations and bring in improvements in related key areas,” informed Savla.

Post implementation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Savla could saw a visible change in a user's ability to interface with customers. He said that the front office staff behaved far more confidently than before thanks to the access that they now had to all relevant customer information.

According to Savla, “Microsoft Dynamic CRM has structured and well-defined customer information that we needed, which was not there in the legacy system. Secondly, in terms of our sales and marketing efforts, they have also become targeted thanks to the functionalities in the system—it allows us to collate and analyze large volumes of customer data, enquiry calls and other information gathered through market research. We can now run more effective campaigns and design better packages than before.”

Based on the aforementioned instances, it is safe to assume that a CRM system can indeed deliver benefits through improved customer interaction based on structured, insightful information, which can ultimately adds to business profitability. In an uncertain market, it is imperative that businesses concentrate their efforts towards customer centric processes. In fact, research has shown that some of the leading factors, which have been driving CRM strategies for organizations in recent times, include leveraging existing customer relationships, retaining customers and increasing customer loyalties, and improving the overall customer experience. The upcoming economic recovery will certainly have better results for companies that will devise CRM programs as per the new economic realities of the day. To put it more bluntly, companies that benefit the most will be those that capitalized on the downturn and prepared for increasing the value of customer relationships. n

rajendra.c@expressindia.com