These are challenging times for creating, developing, and maintaining customer relationships. More than ever, every customer — one who is willing to spend (and pay on time) — is golden. At the same time there are new channels: mobile and social media that customers are choosing and must be opened and maintained. Meanwhile the costs of attracting and keeping each customer must be minimized to maximize net revenues.
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We approached leading customer relationship management (CRM) solutions suppliers for their insights on these issues, including the future direction of this product grouping to meet them. Here is a selection of their responses. The complete replies will appear on TMCnet.com.
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Consona CRM (www.consona.com)
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Tim Hines, Vice President Product Management
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Given the economic climate, companies are doubling down on customer service and support investments. Budgets for marketing and sales initiatives have been diverted to improving the customer service and support infrastructure. This is long overdue. Too much time and money was spent on organizing a sales operation, and while important, it’s just not all that technologically difficult.
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Our approach is for companies to participate and ideally lead the discussion. Social technologies have given the customer a greater voice than they ever had and this is a very good thing. Companies need to address these technologies and leverage them for strategic advantage. In their operations, they need to establish a SMS channel into their support organization. They should integrate Facebook and Twitter into the 360 degree view of the customer and they should deploy a community for their customers to participate in. They need to understand the social structure of the new social media. There absolutely is a new language, an unwritten hierarchy of those that participate if you will and not, understanding and embracing this will be a disaster.
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The concept of the CRM suite is just plain dead….