CRM (Customer Relationship Management) refers to the management of customer relationships. A CRM strategy is a corporate strategy aimed at maintaining and managing positive relationships with customers to generate continuous revenue and ensure profitability.
In today's market, where similar products and services are abundant and competition is intense, it can be difficult to maintain or increase revenue solely by acquiring new customers. Therefore, it is essential to acquire not only new customers but also repeat customers who will make continuous purchases. A CRM strategy must be adopted as a marketing activity that provides an appropriate approach to each individual customer to build strong relationships.
Benefits of a CRM Strategy
A CRM strategy offers various benefits, such as "gaining a deeper understanding of needs," "conducting business based on data," and "deploying approaches tailored to customers." By implementing a CRM strategy, companies can execute effective marketing centered on customer relationships.
Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Needs
Adopting a CRM strategy allows you to understand customer needs at a deeper level. Customer needs can be categorized into those that are apparent through behavior and those that are not easily visible. Latent customer needs are not always easy to grasp, as customers themselves may not be aware of them.
Since apparent needs are also understood by competitors, addressing only those will not lead to differentiation. By implementing a CRM strategy, you can analyze data such as purchase history, website behavior, and customer attributes to identify even latent needs that the customers themselves have not yet realized. By understanding the latent needs of each customer, you can engage them from a perspective that differentiates your company from competitors.
Develop Business Based on Data
Traditionally, sales and marketing activities have relied heavily on the experience and skills of individual sales representatives. However, in the modern era, the importance of data-driven business development—leveraging the vast data collected and managed within a company—has gained significant attention. Relying solely on the knowledge and experience of individual sales representatives provides only a partial view of the customer. In contrast, data accumulated within a company includes not only attribute data such as industry, business type, and organizational structure, but also product purchase history and information regarding customer complaints.
By adopting a CRM strategy, all this customer data can be centrally managed and analyzed. By utilizing vast amounts of historical data to analyze purchasing trends, companies can grasp customer needs with high accuracy. When decisions are based on the results of data analysis, there is no longer a need to rely on individual intuition or skills when determining the direction of marketing initiatives. Because decisions can be made based on reliable analysis results derived from massive accumulated data, marketing activities can be conducted more efficiently.
Implement Approaches Tailored to Customers
As mentioned above, by adopting a CRM strategy that allows for a deep understanding of needs through customer data, companies can implement approaches tailored to each individual customer. By conducting a deep-dive analysis of individual customer attributes and their history of usage and after-sales service, companies can grasp exactly what the customer is seeking and what their specific requests are.
Customer data allows for not only the analysis of trends across large groups but also the detailed examination and analysis of individual data points. If detailed customer needs can be identified through the analysis of individual history data, companies can narrow down the products and services that the individual customer is seeking, provide customized proposals, and implement optimal approaches. Customer history data can be utilized not only for sales approaches but also as a reference for support interactions.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is considered a key driver for increasing LTV (Life Time Value) and is prioritized by many companies. It is widely recognized that acquiring new customers for products and services costs significantly more than reaching out to repeat customers who have already purchased products. Because repeat customers with high satisfaction levels can be approached with lower costs, companies can streamline revenue growth.
By utilizing CRM, customer information can be centrally managed within a system, enabling information sharing across departments such as marketing, sales, and customer support. Every department can view, update, and accumulate various histories, including customer outreach, purchased products and services, and support interactions. By nurturing customers through optimal approaches and campaigns based on accumulated individual data, companies can expect to see an improvement in customer satisfaction.
Reference Article: What Is CRM Marketing? An Easy-to-Understand Guide to Strategies and Benefits
How to Promote a CRM Strategy
To advance a CRM strategy, follow steps such as confirming goals and objectives, setting targets, and designing the customer journey. After implementing the tools, the process is completed by reviewing KPIs and verifying the results.
Confirm Goals and Objectives
First, it is essential to clearly define what you aim to achieve through your CRM strategy. By considering why a CRM strategy is necessary and the current challenges you wish to resolve, you can clarify your goals while identifying the gap between your current state and your desired outcomes. Goals should be specific rather than broad, such as simply "increasing profits." For example, if your objective is to "increase profits by nurturing and retaining repeat customers," you must define your goals at a more granular level, such as "reactivating dormant customers" or "converting existing customers into loyal customers." It is important to set quantitative targets, such as order values, customer counts, and average customer spend, along with specific solutions and the extent to which they should be implemented. To achieve these goals, the content must be shared beyond specific departments. By widely sharing and thoroughly communicating the established goals across relevant departments, each team can collaborate effectively to work toward those objectives.
Set Your Target Audience
Next, define the customers your company will target. Setting a target allows you to narrow down who you should actively communicate with, enabling you to build deeper relationships with your customers. To enhance the effectiveness of CRM in improving customer relationships, you must develop strategies with each individual customer in mind. It is recommended to set your target based on information from people who have already used your company's services or products. Segment your targets in detail—considering attributes such as industry, business type, and office location, as well as organizational structure, specific business operations, and financial status—and create personas to represent your ideal customers. Use these personas to conduct analyses that clarify customer needs, which will then lead to the development of effective, data-driven strategies.
Design a Customer Journey
After setting your targets, design a customer journey that visualizes customer behavior and thought processes. When creating a customer journey map, divide the user's actions into phases, such as "Awareness" when the customer first encounters your product or service, "Consideration" when they compare products, and "Purchase." By incorporating the customer's thoughts and emotional shifts into a framework for each phase, you can complete a customer journey map that provides a comprehensive overview of the entire process. Once the customer's actions and mindset at each phase are visualized through the map, it becomes easier to determine which approach is most effective at any given moment. Designing a customer journey helps streamline the planning and review of marketing initiatives.
Implement Tools
It is effective to advance your CRM strategy by utilizing specialized tools. Implement a CRM tool that allows you to accumulate, centrally manage, and analyze customer data to drive your CRM strategy forward. While implementing a CRM tool involves costs such as initial setup and ongoing running expenses, it is indispensable for leveraging customer management in the development of marketing strategies. Using a tool enables cross-departmental information sharing regarding customer data. For companies where customer information has been siloed—with marketing, sales, and customer service departments holding separate data—implementing a CRM tool that allows for the sharing and verification of the latest data at any time provides various benefits. From purchase history to sales activities conducted for each customer and post-purchase follow-up data, information previously confined to individual departments can be accessed immediately using a CRM tool. Points to note when using CRM tools and detailed selection criteria will be discussed in depth later.
Consider KPIs
After selecting a CRM tool, establish your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). It is necessary to set KPIs to numerically verify whether the implementation of the CRM tool is producing results. KPIs include "inflow to purchase pages," "number of sales meetings," "lead conversion rate (CVR)," "number of orders received," "average customer spend," and "repeat rate." Since the optimal KPIs vary depending on the nature of your business, it is important to appropriately set them by cross-referencing them with the goals you established beforehand to ensure they align with your business objectives.
Verify Results
The KPI values you set are used for analysis to confirm whether your CRM strategy is yielding results. By configuring your CRM tool's dashboard and reporting features to allow for regular monitoring of KPI analysis results, you can easily track key performance outcomes.
In a CRM strategy, it is also necessary to verify and improve your initiatives to understand how well you are progressing toward your goals. By utilizing these performance checks to validate your initiatives and implementing a PDCA cycle for continuous improvement, you can achieve results more efficiently.
Considerations for Implementing CRM Strategy Tools
CRM strategy tools do not necessarily lead to immediate profit improvements upon implementation. When using CRM strategy tools, you gain the ability to accumulate, modify, and leverage a wide variety of customer information. Because these tools simplify customer data analysis, it is important to conduct long-term, recurring analyses to monitor the progress of your initiatives. After implementation, you may see gradual improvements in effectiveness by continuously refining the initiatives necessary to strengthen customer relationships.
To utilize CRM tools strategically, you must appropriately collect and accumulate customer data. Depending on the operational environment of each company, some may struggle to accumulate even basic customer data, such as industry, business type, or office address, which complicates efforts to simplify data entry. If data is insufficient, analyzing it from your own internal records may be difficult. In cases where internal data is limited, utilizing a database with information enrichment capabilities, such as uSonar, allows you to supplement missing information.
When a CRM tool is introduced, there may be cases where it is difficult for employees who are not comfortable with IT tools to adopt them. Since some employees may resist using the tool, it is important to communicate the importance and benefits of the CRM internally before implementation. To ensure employees do not struggle with how to use the tool, training sessions must also be conducted.
How to Select CRM Strategy Tools
When selecting a tool for your CRM strategy, you must pay attention to its features, usability, integration capabilities, and support structure. Rather than focusing on a single point such as features or usability, choose a tool that meets your company's necessary criteria from various perspectives.
Selecting by Features
CRM tools include features such as lead management, schedule management, customer information management, customer analysis, and marketing support. Since the features and details vary by tool, it is important to confirm in advance which functions your company requires. Some tools include automatic report generation for customer analysis, while others are equipped with features to automatically extract target segments for marketing support. By comparing multiple tools, select one that possesses the features necessary to resolve your company's challenges and achieve your objectives.
Selecting by Usability
When choosing a tool, you must also pay attention to its usability. Even if a tool is feature-rich, it may not be utilized in the field if it is difficult to use. This also increases the operational burden on staff to learn how to operate it.
Tools that are easy to operate are more likely to be adopted smoothly by employees. Since many CRM tools offer a "Free Trial Version," it is recommended to verify the user experience before making a selection.
Selecting by Integration Capabilities
CRM tools can further streamline operations by integrating with external tools. It is important to share the latest customer information across all departments. If a tool can integrate with other systems currently in use, you can utilize existing data for analysis without modification. Conversely, if integration with existing data is difficult, you may face the tedious task of converting data into formats like CSV files every time you need to use it. To improve operational efficiency, it is important to confirm integration capabilities before selecting a tool.
Selecting by Support Structure
CRM tools are essential assets that will be used for a long time after implementation. You will often need to consult support when you have questions about how to use the system. A tool with a robust support structure is recommended, as it allows you to get answers and solutions to questions regarding operations, uncertainties, and best practices. While some support services are paid, it is a worthwhile investment if the fees are reasonable, as it provides peace of mind.
[Reference Article] What Is the Necessity of CRM in Marketing? Points for Product Comparison and Selection
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