Best for NIMS MBA Ecommerce Solved Assignment and others
Answer
Definition: E-CRM provides companies with a means to conduct interactive, personalized and relevant communications with customers across both electronic and traditional channels. It utilizes a complete view of the customer to make decisions about the following.
- Messaging
- Promotional offers, and
- Channel delivery.
It synchronizes communications across otherwise disjointed customer-facing systems.
It asks for the permission of the potential customer before talking to him about product or services.
It focuses on understanding how the economics of customer relationships affect the business CRM strategy along with its electronic component constitutes E-CRM.
The trust of E-CRM is not what an organization is doing on the web but how fully an organization ties its online channel back to its traditional channel or customer touch points.
More specifically, we can say that important e-CRM challenges and activities which require management are:
- Using the web site for customer development from generating leads through to conversion to an online or offline sale using e-mail and web-based information to encourage purchase;
- Managing e-mail list quality (coverage of e-mail addresses and integration of customer profile information from other databases to enable targeting);
- Applying e-mail marketing to support up sell and cross-sell;
- Data mining to improve targeting;
- With a web site with personalization or mass customization facilities to automatically recommend the ‘next-best product’;
- Providing online customer service facilities (such as frequently asked questions, callback and chat support) that help achieve conversion to sale (these can be triggered automatically so that visitors to a site who show high intent or distress through multiple page visits can be prompted to enter a chat session or a callback (staff resources may limit offering these to all site visitors);
- Managing online service quality to ensure that first-time buyers have a great customer experience that encourages them to buy again;
- Managing the multi-channel customer experience as customers use different media as part of the buying process and customer lifecycle.
Need of E-CRM
- The CRM offerings remain channel centric not customer centric.
- Contemporary customers facing traditional systems.
- Customer centric metrics is non-existence.
- The CRM Offerings Remain Channel Centric Rather Customer Centric: Host CRM offerings focus in improving the effectiveness of the individual channel that their systems support. While this is a necessary step, it does not address the fundamental question of which customers should be targeted in the channel and how much should be invoked in them. At a typical bank, the majority of customers are unprofitable. Regardless of how efficient customer communications may be through any channel, these customers will remain unprofitable.
- Customer Centric Metrics Do Not Exist: Most CRM offerings have weak metrics and measurement capabilities. Generally those with customer profitability return on investment of customer interaction and lifetime value of a customer because data needed for this falls outside the reach and design of channel centric system. Instead they focus on operational metrics such as wait time on calls, the number of annoyed callers. While these metrics are important to run various channels operationally, they fail to address the question. Are we investing the right amount of resource on customers with the most value? Answering the question requires a holistic view of customer experience.
- Customer Facing Systems Create New Islands of Non-Integrated Information: Contemporary customers facing traditional systems such as sales force automation and cusDefinition: E-CRM provides companies with a means to conduct interactive, personalized and relevant communications with customers across both electronic and traditional channels. It utilizes a complete view of the customer to make decisions about the following.tomer care often have their own data models and data stores that manage only the information that their application requires and generates. These systems rarely interact with others, as they remain isolated.
Example: A customer, who has ordered a product and has a question about the status of that order, rather than calling a customer service number, the customer is able to return to the web site and inquire about the order through self service, which queries the company’s order processing system automatically to return the status of the order. The customer can do this whenever it is convenient, and the company saves thousands of dollars in customer service costs.
