Getting to Grips with Customer Relationship Management via CRM Metrics
Customer relationship management forms an important part of many business strategies; and hence, using powerful tools such as CRM metrics properly is vital to the success of many companies.
Customer relationship management is a business strategy that puts focus on creating, maintaining, and improving working relationships with an organization’s clients. It is applicable to almost any organization because, after all, a company that does not put its customers’ interests first is destined for failure. Now, customer relationship management or CRM is no simple strategy, and consists of considering the many varied aspects and processes involved. The most common approach towards getting a handle on such a business system is through the judicious choice and tracking of CRM metrics.
Metrics help managers and employees alike clarify their goals and visualize concretely what success would look like. Some leaders and executives set goals and objectives merely by throwing around buzzwords and other terms that just “sound nice”. While this may seem well and good to them, their employees are more often than not left in the dark as to how to go about fulfilling these unclear goals. Lofty goals, no matter how grand sounding, will not lead to any progress if they are not formulated clearly and in a measurable manner. This is as true for CRM as for any other system or business model.
Metrics help clarify goals because the process of selecting metrics to monitor forces managers to better define what exactly the company’s objectives are. That is, these quantities should be chosen in close association with the formulation of objectives, all the way from the most general down to the most specific. Apart from this, data-based management yields, in most cases, a more accurate view of organizational circumstances and performance. Of course, as with any business strategy, success will depend on proper planning, execution, and follow-through.
Clear goals and a clear way to measure performance, taken together, form the basis for a feedback loop that will be of great help in regulating any company. Since achievement and progress become possible to be measured, managers and employees will be more aware, at all times, whether they are moving closer or further from success.
So, for customer relationship management in particular, metric choice is also quite important, because this will be linked to the objective of the organization initiative. This will be linked to many factors, including the organization’s size, level of maturity, customer base, and so on. For instance, a telecommunications company interested in improving its level of customer service might track metrics, like call time, hold time, number of repeat calls, customer satisfaction, and number of topics discussed per contact. A company dealing in direct sales, on the other hand, might track metrics, like average revenue per salesman, number of repeat customers per salesman, number of new customers, and so on.
CRM metrics are thus as varied and wide-ranging as CRM itself. This should not be overwhelming, but rather should inspire confidence in the fact that metrics should be able to handle matters adequately. That is, backed with the proper strategies, goal-setting, and planning, selecting the right quantities to monitor and then putting in place the right system will yield good results for any CRM initiative.
