Analysis and Planning

Determine your competitive arena and the competitive challenge facing your company. Determine which companies are trying to win your best present and future customers, or increase their share of business from these customers.

Ensure that the company's strategic objectives are communicated through the organization in a way that links them to the retention, efficiency, acquisition, penetration in CM (we refer to these as the REAP measures).

Be clear about profit and where it comes from; in particular, from which customers.

Determine how much you can afford to spend on acquisition, development and retention of different customer groups, and align resources to value (and maybe needs) segments.

Be greedy for knowledge from customers, staff and partners.

Proposition

Develop clear and differentiated propositions aimed at those customers you want to manage.

Determine how you can build loyalty among key value groups.

Cascade the proposition from high-level brand values to influence the organization's behaviours.

Communicate your customer propositions well to employees, partners and customers, and measure the resulting behaviour and attitude change.

Customer Management Activity

Overall

Develop practical and efficient acquisition, development, retention and efficiency plans.

Acquisition

• Targeting

• Enquiry management

• Winback

• Develop and measure effective enquiry management processes that identify future customers and business that will be good for your company (convertible, profitable, retainable etc).

• Develop winback programmes for selected former customers.

Early retention

• Welcoming

• Getting to know

• Provide thanks - as a courtesy and reinforcement of purchasing decision.

• Ensure early relationship service-management works.

• Monitor early transactions for indications of usage, higher future potential or risk of early attrition.

• Build an understanding of customers: how they want to be managed and what their potential might be.

Repeat purchase

• Ongoing management

• Managing dissatisfaction

• Let customers service (manage) themselves and their data.

• Try to predict defections through customer feedback and contact analysis.

• Proactively contact high value groups regularly.

• Manage key accounts in ways that are mutually beneficial.

• Identify dissatisfaction and manage it timely and well.

• Encourage a no-blame and learning culture in the whole organization.

• Don't underestimate the value of good customer service. In these days of choice and when customers have the confidence to change, their service experience is key.

People and Organization

Provide customer management leadership with cross functional/ departmental authority.

Ensure the organization is flexible enough to support customer-oriented decision making.

Align objectives throughout the organization to focus on profitable customer management.

Recruit and develop people with the right skills and orientation.

Ensure that incentives ant Rewards encourage desired CM behaviours.

Understand employee satisfaction and commitment and its relationship with CM.

Actively manage those partnerships and alliances that affect your customers.

Measurement

Measure customer behaviours, attitudes and activities and their impact on ROI.

Measure how different media (touch points and types) affect CM results.

Measure and learn from campaigns.

Measure the effectiveness and efficiency of individuals.

Customer Experience

Understand how customer commitment (buying, responding) and customer satisfaction are related.

Understand performance in individual and combined (relationship) moments of truth at all customer contact points, absolutely and relative to competition.

Benchmark against others in the company's competitive arena and outside it.

Information and Technology

• Understand priorities and dependencies that support ROI from CM.

• Understand customer data application, acquisition and maintenance.

• Increase visibility of appropriate customer data (to employees and partners).

• Increase visibility of customer data (to customers).

• Understand and implement support for the business integration requirements driven by CM.

Process

• Define and integrate processes based around the proposition.

• Replicate or grow successful processes for improved ROI.