Never lose another customer. Gather customer knowledge. Build customer interactions. Improve profitability. And up-sell and cross-sell more effectively. If only!

CRM or Customer Relationship Management should really stand for CUSTOMERS REALLY MATTER. Because if they don’t it doesn’t matter what software solution you purchase it will make no difference to your customers or your company’s bottom line.

Customer Relationship Management is NOT a technology issue. It is about tuning the business to its customers and finding ways to meet and exceed customer expectations. And to turn that experience into improved company revenue and profitability by improving retention, reducing churn, increased cross-sell and up-sell, improved lifetime value and increased referrals.

CRM is all about the process of change. Turning your company into one which is truly customer focussed and is prepared to act on customer data and customer feedback. Because collecting information is only one part of the equation. It is of no value if it is not acted upon.

Many companies are looking to the CRM industry as the solution to providing differentiated customer service and this point of view is certainly being promoted by the CRM vendors. Figures show the growth of spending in this market as nothing short of staggering. In 1998 IT departments spent just $35.87 million dollars on CRM software products. IDC (International Data Corporation) expects this expenditure to grow to $221million dollars by 2003 — that’s a 43% annual growth rate! But will this spending do anything positive for the bottom line?

In fact, recent research shows that only 5% of the top 2,000 Australian companies are fully exploiting technology to improve customer information. There is a tremendous range of CRM products on the market today, some are ‘older’ sales tracking products that have been revamped whilst other are written to take full advantage of the Internet and the new economy. But one of things they all have in common is that to be effective one needs to change the focus of the whole organisation. And that is a big challenge.

Check out some of the best CRM’s available today:

I recently spent 40 minutes hanging onto the telephone trying to contact one our larger computer companies customer care lines, before being deliberately cut off. I was so frustrated I sent an e-mail to complain.

This is the response I received:

"Thank you for contacting XXXXXX Australia. Your feedback is important to us. If you have asked for assistance, we will be in contact to help you with your enquiry."

What would your reaction be to this? Me. I came away 'knowing' that my feedback was NOT important to them!

Share your horror stories or good news experiences.

How easy is your company to do business with? Have you ever tried to telephone a particular member of staff or make a complaint? Try it, you may be surprised!

Recently I was asked to call a senior manager at a company here in Sydney. Unfortunately I misplaced the phone number (stupid me!). No problem. Check with directory enquiries, only to be told the only number available was the call centre 1300 number. Oh well. Into the call centre. Through three levels of IVR (interactive voice response) before being able to contact an operator.

After a wait of several minutes because ‘all our operators are busy right now, but your call is important to us’…(you know the routine), I was eventually speaking to an operator. No, she couldn’t give me his direct number but she could put me through. Great! Oops. Not in, but at least voice mail (recorded message to you and me), or press 6 and speak to his assistance. So close, but not good enough. His assistance was on voice mail as well.

All in all a very frustrating and unfortunately an all too common experience. And not just for you and me, but also for your customers.

Global Partners Customer Contact Evaluation (CCE) provides a detailed report on how easy your organisation is to do business with and highlights areas of excellent customer contact, those areas in need of improvement and areas of opportunity. It is an invaluable aid to developing an improved customer service strategy and helps shift the organisations view to focus more directly on the customer.

We now offer the opportunity to evaluate your e-commerce contact strategy, where we examine your organisations' response to electronic enquiries and web interactions to help you get more out of the Internet.

Customer Contact World Email response survey revealed:
In Australia.
40% of companies replies in 3 days
35% of companies replied in 3-7 days
25% of companies didn't reply at all.

Forrester Research has predicted that a staggering 250 billion, solicited commercial e-mails will be sent in 2002. In the US a ‘typical worker recieves 200 e-mails per day!

With figures like these it’s not surprising that of the top 50 e-commerce sites, only 40% responded to e-mail product enquiries!

How do organsiations handle large volumes of e-mails?

The answer is, sadly, most don’t!

One of the things the internet has done has compressed time! When a customer sends an e-mail to your company, they believe that it will arrive immediately. And they expect it to be responded to promptly. Not in 48 hours, or 24 hours, but within several hours, if not within minutes. Never mind that the enquiry is received by the wrong department, or needs to be referred to someone else. It has been sent, and therefore it has arrived! It’s no wonder customers experience unsatisfactory service.

Yet the internet remains a vast, as yet, a mainly untapped reservoir of business opportunities.

Let’s be honest. This is primarily a marketing tool for Global Partners. But whilst we do not intend to give away our processes, systems and intellectual property for free on the Net we do want you to have a web experience that is satisfying. Because most ‘interactions’ we have on the Net tend to leave us wanting.

We would like you to experience something more than simply viewing our brochure. We believe the Web can actively build strong customer relationships, and one of the ways it can do this, is by building dialogue. We want to encourage a two-way exchange between our company and our customers. (Our existing customers, in fact, have access to a whole range of products, services and information resources available to them in their own secure area). The Internet allows us to communicate with those customers who prefer to use this medium and whose on-going business we value.

However, this is an evolving process, and we certainly have not got it completely right, but over time, with the input and feedback from our customers, this site can prove to be a valuable information resource for those seeking to improve customer service within their own organisation.

Whilst Australia is slow to embrace on-line banking, new virtual banks are already making good headway in Europe and North America. One such new enterprise in the UK has attracted over 900,000 customers since launching in late 1998.