Assignment of B2B

Navya Surapaneni 09127

What are the areas you would concentrate to ‘sustain customer relationships’? What are

the strategic issues to be considered; how would you deliver superior value resulting into

pursuing continuity and growth?

Maintaining profitable relationships with the customers is a key job of the marketing managers

so that they can bring good quality products in market and have large customer equity. The

marketing managers can sustain good relationships with the customers by getting in touch with

their mails, online reviews, and blogs on the product website, key telephone inquiries and other

communication channels. Connected channels allow the marketing managers to be aware of the

changing customer needs which can allow the managers to introduce improvement in the

existing products. The new product idea can be generated from the customer's ideas and their

needs which can help sustaining the organization business and profits

a customer's satisfaction and loyalty are something all businesses desire. But often some

businesses neglect to take on that extra step to ensure clients return for more orders and re-

purchase. Customer management plays an important role when it comes to customer satisfaction

and retention.

Customers come back to business that shows exceptional service which means they are satisfied

that they are treated with special care. It is therefore important to have customer loyalty systems

in place. Once a rapport is established with customers, they are sure to keep coming back. Here

are effective ways to encourage customers to ensure they do.

The most important thing in sales and marketing is to attract and retain your most profitable

business customers. In order to accomplish this feat, you must devise and implement a customer

strategy that builds, fosters, nurtures, and extends relationships with your customers.  Your

company profits only when the earnings from retained customers exceed the costs to acquire and

to service customers over time.

Creating and managing this balance can be a major challenge to management. However,

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications offer solutions to this challenge.  CRM

is the process of tracking and managing all aspects of a company’s interaction with its customers,

including prospecting, sales, and service.

Here are just a few customer touch points that you can use to strengthen your relationships and

keep your customers informed and engaged:

Email messages, newsletters, and surveys: Provide product/service updates, promote

goods and services, and communicate news/events.

Feedback: Ask for, capture, and act on your customer’s input.

Insight: Research your customers’ markets, strategies, and goals.

Customer loyalty: Implement loyalty, affinity, and rewards programs.

Relationship building: Talk and listen to customers in order to maintain a dialogue and to

build a trust based relationship.

Be accessible: Make it easy for customers to reach you.

Customer satisfaction: Implement a customer satisfaction policy that provides a way to

resolve/remedy problems and issues.

Involvement: Engage customers in product development /enhancement, via beta tests,

focus groups, and pilots.

Anticipate customer needs: Learn their business, their purchasing patterns, and their

requirements for effective proactive solutions.

Become an indispensable resource: Look for ways to add value, to be a real partner, and

to help your customers achieve results.

Help lines: Provide support, service, advice, and information.

The key is to aim for customer satisfaction, before and after each sale. The following factors are

important customer management drivers:

Clarify the preparation involved in the purchase

This includes the costs and possible changes, if there exist, along with the initial purchase price

and the service requirements for the product.

Create a plan the customer must do to use the product

This plan should be kept as simple as possible to be understood. If steps are needed, they should

be provided in the correct sequence.

Follow up to show care satisfies a customer

Following up to make sure that the product is being used correctly demonstrates caring and

involvement. It is good customer management and great customer service.

Do the extra mile if necessary

This is something that will make customers feel important. Customer loyalty programs and

reward schemes are great practices to make the customers feel good. Here are tips that support

business to secure customer loyalty.

Send thank you cards or short letters. Do this every single time a sale is made, every time

a referral is received, every time they visit the business.

Send Christmas cards with a difference. During the Christmas season, surprise the

customer with a small token gift or special voucher that they can redeem.

Stick their photos with a testimonial around the walls of business. This goes with the

permission of the customers. Most likely, special customers will bring their friends in to

look at their pictures.

Hold occasional invitation-only sales. This will make them feel special as a customer and

they will come with the intention of buying.

Ask customers for feedback on the business service performance. It shows their

suggestions and input are greatly appreciated and valued.

By making use of all the above strategies and techniques means, a business owner gets maximum

impact to gain and sustain customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Business leaders must do four things to have profitable customer relationships.

1. You must continuously be attracting (profitable) new customers in the industry sectors that

you have identified in your strategic plan. 

2. You must actively retain your (profitable) current customers and re-establish relationships

with past customers. 

3. You must customize your product and service offerings to better meet your customer's

expectations and needs.

4. Your employees must be continuously trained and rewarded for delivering exceptional

customer service.

New Customers: The industry sectors that you have identified for growth in your strategic plan

must be implemented throughout your company. Your sales team must have their commission

structure designed to reflect (and reward) closed sales in the industries you have committed to

pursue. When you are marketing and selling to your new marketplace you need to make sure that

the products and services you offer are profitable. In other words, you must conduct a customer

profitability analysis at the beginning of the sale, and periodically during the sales cycle. Too

many companies focus their marketing dollars on their customers that are the largest revenue

generator. Remember profits are revenue minus costs, so you need to make sure your entire

customer relationships are producing the results you initially projected.

Current and Past Customers: You worked hard to attract new customers to your business and

know you need to continue to work to establish and strengthen the relationship you created. The

more you know about your customer's organization, their buying habits and patterns, their

growth plans and their operations, the more successful you will be in designing your relationship

programs to meet their needs. The goal is to be so familiar and become so indispensable to your

customers that your company is the only one they consider when purchasing products and

services.

Employees: People treat people like they are treated. In order to deliver exceptional customer

service (a must requirement for every employee in your organization) you need to make sure the

core values for your organization specifically address your commitment to your customers and

your employees. Customer and employee satisfaction are intertwined and business leaders must

recognize and reward employees for the value they continuously add to the organization. When

things go wrong, your employees need the training and resources to turn your dissatisfied

customers, into happy, satisfied, and repeat customers. Make sure you have a resolution ladder in

place, so unhappy customers can immediately be connected to someone who has the authority to

resolve their issue.

For your company to create and sustain long-term profitability you must continuously develop

and improve your customer relations. Treat your customers as the valuable assets that they are.

Periodically conduct a customer profitability analysis and use your technology to customize your

products and services to meet your individual customer's needs and watch your company's

growth skyrocket!

Developing, maintaining, and sustaining the close bond between the customer and company is

known as customer relationship. Companies across the horizon, to enrich the bond of customer

relationship, are using the new database technologies that enable the management to know all

about customers and offer customers a platform to interact with the company. Today, customers

and companies share information, which has helped the company to revive their relationship with

customers and manage the customer relationship.

The CRM Business Cycle is:

Acquisition and Retaining

Understand and Differentiate

Develop and Customize

Interact and Deliver

Acquisition and Retaining

Acquisition is a vital stage in building customer relationship.  For the purpose of customer

acquisition, an organization is likely to focus its attention the suspects, enquiries, lapsed

customers, former customers, competitor’s customers’ referrals, and the existing buyers.  From

these the organizations need to acquire customers and prospective customers and retain valuable

customers.

Understand and Differentiate

Organizations cannot have a relationship with customers unless they understand them what they

value, what types of service are important to them, how and when they like to interact and what

they want to buy.  True understanding is based on a combination of detailed analysis and

interaction. To understand the customers the various activities required are:

Profiling to understand demographics, purchase patterns and channel preference.

Segmentation to identify logical unique groups of customers that tend to look alike and

behave in a similar fashion.  While the promise of one-one marketing sounds good, we

have not seen many organizations that have mastered the art of treating each customer

uniquely.  Identification of actionable segments is a practical place to start.

Primary research to capture needs and attitudes.

Customer valuation to understand profitability, as well as lifetime value or long-term

potential.  Value may also be based on the customer’s ability or inclination to refer other

profitable customers.

Customer need to see that the company is tailoring service and communications based on

what they have learnt independently and on what the customers have told to them.

Develop and Customize

In the product world of yesterday, companies developed products and services and expected

customers to buy them.  In a customer-focused world, product and channel development has to

follow the customer’s lead.  Organizations are increasingly developing products and services and

even new channels based on customer needs and service expectations.

Interact and Deliver

Interaction is also a critical component of a successful CRM initiative.  It is important to

remember that interaction doesn’t just occur through marketing and sales channels and media;

customers interact in many different ways with many different areas of the organization,

including distribution and shipping, customer service and online.

There is a strong correlation between long-term business success and long-term customer

relationships. Successful businesses capitalize on every stage of the customer life cycle-from

customer selection, to customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer growth.  Once a

certain level of trust and comfort has been established, most customers prefer to remain loyal to

companies and their products.

With access to information and appropriate training, organizations will be prepared to steadily

increase the value they deliver to customers.

CRM Technology:

The application of technology is the most exciting, fastest growing and changing the way

customers get information about products and services.  Technology includes all the equipment,

software, and communication links that organizations use to enable or improve their processes. 

The mostly used tools are

Sales Force Automation

The internet can be used by the company in imparting proper training to its sales force.  In depth

product information, specialized databases of solutions, sales force support queries, and a set of

internal information on the internet can improve the productivity of the sales force.

Call Centers

Call Center helps in automating the operations of inbound and outbound calls generated between

company and its customers.  These solutions integrate the voice switch of automated telephone

systems with agent host software allowing for automatic call routing to agents, auto display of

relevant customer data, predictive dialing, self-service Interactive Voice Response systems, etc. 

Data Warehousing

A data warehouse is an implementation of an informational database used to store shareable data

that originates in an operational database-of-record and in external market data sources.  It is

typically a subject database that allows users to tap into a company’s vast store of operational

data to track and respond to business trends and facilitates forecasting and planning efforts.

Data Mining and OLAP

Data mining involves specialized software tools that allow users to sift through large amounts of

data to uncover data content relationships and build models to predict customer behavior. 

OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), also known as multi-dimensional data analysis, offers

advanced capabilities in querying and analyzing the information in a data warehouse. 

Decision Support and Reporting Tools

Web enabled reporting tools and executive information systems are used to deploy the business

information that has been discovered. 

Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS)

The main benefit of EPOS and retail scanner systems is the amount of timely and accurate

information they deliver.  Advances in the technology have significantly aided the scope for data

analysis.

Benefits of sustaining customer relationships:

1. Expansion of customer base.

2. Maximization of opportunities

3. Growth in numbers of customers

4. Easy introduction of new products.

5. Increase in customer partnering, etc.

6. Easy business expansion possibilities.

7. Highlighting poor operational processes

8. Long term profitability and sustainability

9. Benefiting customer selectivity approach.

10. Generation of more and more loyal customers.

11. Increase in the number of profitable customers.

12. Ensuring that the focus of the organization is external

13. Reduced costs, because the right things are being done

14. Reduction in advertisement and other sales promotional expenses.

15. Increased access to a source of market and competitor information

16. Increased customer satisfaction, because they are getting exactly what they want

Apart from the above mentioned business benefits, the customers are also benefited in terms of

improved service quality, personalized care, reduction of customer stress, increased value of

money, customer empowerment.

Highly satisfied customers who perceive a high value in your products and services commonly

make excellent advocates for your organization - nurture these customers and give the special

treatment.

Dissatisfied customers who perceive a low value in your products and services are potential

saboteurs. These customers could have little or no loyalty and may actively 'engage' against your

organization. Therefore you should seek to rebuild relationships and trust, and a new basis for a

future relationship, or manage the separation with dignity, professionalism and integrity.

5 steps you can take to keep your customers happy:

1. Put Your Customer First And Identify The Best One: Customer focus is a must to begin with

and no matter what you do, you are at the service of your customer. Customer service begins

with your employees following this rule. Gathering customer information like birthdays, their

preferences, habits, spending profiles, etc. and acting upon it paves the way for healthy

interactions with them in addition to collecting feedback about your products and services. Some

companies are actually using six sigma to help achieve this systematically.

2. Keep Updating Customer Data By Staying Close To Them: Customer profiles keep changing

with changes to their financial and social conditions. A change in contact details or purchase

preferences comes in handy in the management of customer relationships. For example, a card

sent when a customer purchases their first home is certain to please the customer. This also helps

adjust products and services according to customers' expectations.

3. Categorize Customers: You can group customers broadly by their demands, specific

requirements and nature. You can start doing this by asking basic questions. As expectations

vary, one single product may not satisfy everyone. Different products and services may have to

be developed to meet different customer needs. Many companies have used six sigma to help

achieve this.

4. Pay Attention to The Little Details: Ironing out little shortcomings is a mark of perfection and

catches attention of niche customers. This little extra is the thing that makes you stand out in the

crowd. Customers love to identify themselves with companies that do this.

5. Communicate Positively: Communicating to target customers need not be just about your

services/products. You can communicate positively midway through the service for a

tip/correction or take/give a suggestion that pleases the customer. This is also perceived as an

attempt to develop personalized communication and service.

If keeping customers happy is the mantra for sustaining and growing your business, this end goal

is perhaps the basic purpose of six sigma methodology which many companies have effectively

used to increase customer satisfaction.