Or the Myth of Cost Reduction versus Profitability Increase
By Robert Nsinga
If you don’t know your customers, in executing a social-centered CRM how do you tell you’ve had enough business with them?” – reads the title of a marketing whitepaper. It is Saturday morning, in September of 2010 and this question is the spark that lit me to venture into the promise technology holds for the management of customer relationships, or CRM, on the eve of my 27th birthday. I named my venture Ceable.
CRM is ideally supposed to push your sales up while pulling your costs down, although none of its activities can be considered a sale or cost reduction exercise. This information drives the sales, pricing, supply chain, and overall product cycle management for you. The employees that are likely to get in direct contact with customers in such areas as sales, marketing, and customer support are then equipped to make quick and informed decisions about each customer.
The Rwanda Development Board (RDB) has initiated a vast campaign called “Na Yombi” aimed at enticing the business community into caring for their customers. The business environment hasn’t felt the tilt yet. There is an apparent blockage to achieving ideal customer care. I remember staying at a hotel in Bujumbura, Burundi, and the rich and charming interaction I had with the waiter while my lunch was taking long to reach. The dining hall wasn’t crowded, and there was an important soccer event taking place. I remember asking myself why this young man isn’t concerned about the emptiness of the room and the loud screams of people cheering for soccer on the flat screen above me. I also remember how sad I felt knowing that in Kigali, my town, such behavior towards a customer is scarce. If I had been in Kigali, first of all the entire hall would be filled with the kitchen staff watching from the only screen in the place, and secondly the waiter would not waste time chatting with me.
In my three-stranded rope, the people –or the employees, must buy in to and support CRM. It hurts to say that the societal perception of a satisfied customer needs to change from the root. Your employees must believe in your product every second of the day to be able to sell it from their own heart. To change the perception, then, means first to learn how society performs from their heart.
After all, good customer relations are at the heart of business success. It’s the heart that counts, not the sweat.
The second strand is “process”. It’s not a waiter’s job to make customers happy. It is the kitchen, the store, the cleaning, and the delivery department’s job to make customers happy. The hair in the soup is rarely the fault of the waiter. Everyone has an important stake in customer satisfaction, even if your work it to deal with fellow colleagues only. Make your colleagues at work happy, and you will have contributed a great deal to the overall CRM.
The third strand is technology, or how fast you are able to know your customer, and to what extent. Social CRM is a new trend that combines the power of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Skype etc.) in executing a social-centered CRM strategy. Google believes that data is everything and although data gathering seems tedious and at times senseless, it pays off in the end. There isn’t a better search engine than Google’s, and its accuracy is in direct correlation with the petabytes of “senseless” data Google stores each day.
Storing information about your customer is one thing, knowing how to take decisions based on information from your customers is another thing. At one point or another, we have convinced ourselves that technology has the power to reduce costs while increasing productivity. And when productivity is up, sales are up as well. The more you accurately target your markets (learning) the less you spend on pushing your profitability up. Don’t do splash marketing, do targeted marketing.
Take these three strands for a spin, and see how that works for you!
The author is an information systems architect, programmer, enthusiast photographer and the geek behind the RwandAir Internet booking engine and online payments facilities.
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