Build CRM capabilities to drive customer value and organizational responsiveness
Today’s complexities instil the need within many organizations to build or refresh customer relationship management capabilities. As mounting global competition makes products and services increasingly similar and customer awareness of alternatives increases, it is more difficult for organizations to identify, gain and maintain the most attractive customers. Customer relationships have become one of the most important assets of sales and marketing-driven businesses. Organizations have to take a more rigorous approach to targeting their prospects and to create attractive offers. To this end, they need to develop a more scientific approach to understanding customer churn on a value-based segment-by-segment basis. The increasing diversity of customer needs and tastes has made it crucial to comprehend them and respond appropriately with offers tailored to individual needs. For the (most) valuable customers strong incentives and loyalty program needs to be provided to ensure that the customers are using the company’s business over and over again. In addition, the increasing volatility of business requires highly flexible operating models and processes. The traditional split of tasks in gaining, servicing and retaining customers no longer works; customer value is driven across marketing, sales and operations. Planning must be a widely embedded capability that extends across business functions. Closer relationships with suppliers, channel partners and customers have to be established to share critical data in real time.
NOOTABEENE helps clients to better understand their customers. Using value and needs-based customer segmentation, the right strategy to access, gain and retain customers in the most efficient and effective way possible is formulated. The pillars of CRM Excellence are approaches to segmenting and then managing (targeted) customers either directly, through channel partners or with loyalty programs:
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• Customer profiling and segmentation
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Identifying and embedding a robust customer base and a segmentation strategy to enable targeted marketing and sales efforts, improve customer experience and realize higher returns on marketing spend
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• Market profiling and segmentation
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Understanding how the target customers behave in different channels, and how they can be effectively reached with products and services that meet specific needs, and leveraging the insights to the benefit of all functions
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• Customer scoring and
lead management
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Rating the customer importance for a certain business purpose and ensuring that leads generated by marketing are routed properly to the sales channels, resulting in improved process efficiency and sales per lead conversion
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• Service planning and forecasting
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Analyzing the market for customer's services and helping to meet customer demand through the development of appropriate operating plans
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• Marketing Resource Management
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Optimizing marketing spend, managing channels and enabling tracking and measurement of marketing programs
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• Proposition development
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Capturing customer and channel data, and transforming this data into insights to develop an intelligent offer, set up targeted one-to-one strategies and establish appropriate communication
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• Loyalty management
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Developing effective customer loyalty programs based on unique customer needs to reward favourable behaviour, nurture relations, and increase lifetime value
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• One Customer View
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Establishing cross-functional coordination between channels, functions, and categories with a (real-time) approach to data collection, sharing, and usage
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• Supplier and multi-
channel engagement
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Nurturing long-term relationships with channel partners and establishing channel design, deployment, coordination, integration, and evaluation to generate value creating interactions with customers
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• Customer experience
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Generating effective and efficient interactions across the value chain to maximize the blend of a brand’s physical performance and emotions evoked, measured against customer’s expectations and cost to serve
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Review your Customer Relationship Management capabilities on common pitfalls to decide if NOOTABEENE’s support is required to drive customer value:
• Is an effective segmentation of the market and customer base identified and embedded?
• Are the existing propositions effective for key segments?
• Is customer value evaluated to prioritize and select the most valuable and attractive relationships?
• Is known which customers are vulnerable to churn?
• Is known what customers really want and how you deliver against them?
• Is a branded customer experience delivered in the most cost-effective way?
• Is known which customers to target with up-sell and cross-sell activities and how?
• Are true customer insights generated within the organization?
• Are customer interactions recorded and visible to avoid cold leads and inappropriate communication?
• Are the functional centres connected; are the processes formally systematized and responsibilities divided?
• Are end-to-end processes in place involving employees, customers, suppliers, and channel partners?
• Are organizational-wide duplications of processes, systems and tools removed?
• Is the organization able to control events in real-time, e.g. marketing campaigns, call centre staffing levels, and sales assignments?
• Is the marketing mix aligned with relevant customer touch points (360 degree marketing)? | 
