Customer Relationship Manager

Having a senior management level sponsorship between the two companies from the very beginning always helps alleviate issues like this. It's normal to bend over backwards in such cases and offer price discounts, free training sessions, and complimentary consulting services to retain such accounts. It's important that you engage with both the top level and mid level management in such cases. This becomes a selling opportunity and not a retention opportunity. You'd need to resell the value of your product all over again. It's important to re-evaluate the problem points you're trying to solve, and then present the solution again. Identifying new sponsors within the customer account also helps.

Today's customers are empowered. Empowered customers are those having the control to buy goods or services from a business when and where they want it, by selecting from a vast range of available choice. Empowered customers access the Internet and collect information about products, dealers, and prices. They take advice from friends or at times from strangers too, before making a buying decision.

By using various digital devices, they can find out the specifications of a product or service before arriving at buying decision. They are smart and alert buyers who also keep high expectations. When a business fulfills most of the expectations, the empowered customers can be loyal to them.

Let us analyze the phases a customer goes through when a business offers products/services to the customers.

Such customers often demand an extremely low price for your products or services. A price which is possibly impossible to sell at. In such scenarios, it's always helpful to do an ROI analysis with the customer. They might spend only 50% of what they're spending now, by going to a competitor, but with that additional cost, you're providing XYZ services / features that no one else can, a dedicated and highly motivated customer support team which thrives on customer satisfaction, the confidence and guarantee of your time tested and proven solution that is COMPLETE in all respects, and the confidence that you'd come to their rescue ANYTIME they need help.

This answer can also be customized based on the specific industry in question.

It's important to remember that you may not always be able to retain a customer in such circumstances. However, never engage in an aggressive standoff, or bad mouth your competition. Hold your ground and trust your product. This customer will come back if you genuinely provide a superior solution.

It is the collection of customer-related information focusing on historic sales, current opportunities, and future opportunities. These databases are maintained by a number of different functions such as sales managers, channel managers, product managers, etc. It can store information such as:

► Customer's personal information containing fields for name, address, contact details, contact preferences, age, marital status, birthdate, anniversary, professional and social status, etc.

► Sales managers can record past transactions, product preferences, opportunities, campaigns, enquiries, billing, etc.

► Channel managers can record business-owned retail outlets, online retail information.

► Product managers may record product preference, price band, product categories explored, etc.

As the existing customers drive current business profitability, retaining them is vital for any business. Customer retention is the process of maintaining continuous trading relationship in long term. It can be achieved by the following strategies −

► Negative Strategies

The clauses of penalty, switching costs, and high exit costs make the customers feel trapped with the business. If the business enforces such strategies, it risks the reputation by customers' negative word-of-mouth.

► Positive Strategies

They help increasing customer delight by understanding customer requirements, meeting them, and providing little more beyond their expectation. Customers are delighted to do business with you when their perception is more than their expectation.

There are seven core customer management strategies −

► Start a relationship − When a customer is identified as having a high potential to bring profits, start a relationship.

► Protect the relationship − When the customer is significant for the business and when there is a possibility of the competitor's attraction, then the managers need to protect the relationship.

► Relationship re-engineering − This is necessary when the managers find that the customer is not profitable as desired at the current stage. In such a case, serve the customer by low-cost automated channels.

► Enhance the relationship − The managers identify up-selling and cross-selling opportunities and try to boost the customer on the scale of value.

► Harvest the relationship − When the managers do not want to spend much on the existing customer development, they use the cash flow from these customers to develop new customers.

► End the relationship − It is good to end the relationship when the customer shows no sign of contributing to future business profit.

► Regain the customer − When the customer goes to the competitor while choosing another option to fulfill his requirement, then the managers need to implement win-back strategies to regain the customer and understand the reason of departing the customer.

Here are a few things that are extremely critical for any RM or Account Manager to keep in mind before going in for such a presentation:

1. Be absolutely clear about the pain points that you're going to address.

2. Before getting deeper in to your presentation, get a sign off from the attendees on the agenda of the meeting.

3. Be thorough in your background research of the client. This research could vary based on the stage you're approaching them in.

4. Provide a crisp and clear solution, and leave them with specific action items at the end of the presentation. This ensures they come back to you and the engagement continues.

5. Don't give away all that you have in your bag right away. Weigh your answers and ask probing questions.

Customer Life Cycle is used to describe the phases through a customer goes. Here are the important stages of a customer life cycle −

► Reaching − It is the phase where a business communicates with its target customer. It is mainly done through advertisements.

► Acquisition − Attracting and influencing the target customer. The marketing team decides the scope of the target audience and convinces the customers about the benefits of its products/services.

► Conversion − It is when customers decide to purchase a product or service.

► Retention − In addition to flawless products/services, the business offers some extra facilities to the customer such as priority treatment, beautiful store ambience, free parking, etc., to retain existing customers.

► Inspiration − To inspire a regular customer into a loyal one by establishing a sound relationship. When a business puts efforts on providing polite and quick service, personal attention from the staff, knowledgeable sales staff, then the customers are automatically inspired to buy a product/service from a particular vendor.

Customer Life Cycle

Let us now try to figure out what differentiates a customer from a consumer.

Yes, I have three that anyone can use. First, consider your future needs. Look down the road and ask "How many contacts will I have in five years?" "How many salespeople will I have?" "How many of my people will need real-time access to this information at home or on their phones and PDAs?" "How much would it cost me to replace these contacts?"

Second, take the opportunity to clean up your data now. Moving to a CRM solution is an opportunity to start with a clean version of accurate data. De-duplicate and otherwise scrub the data to minimize the possibility of needing to import twice. For example, the flexibility of Excel and Outlook BCM allow placing incorrectly formatted information in their fields. This data will not import well without some good planning.

Third, be sure to communicate throughout the process and get early buy-in. The biggest focus of Saleforce.com with its customers is adoption. Members of your team are influencers in their departments. Leverage their expertise and influence by building a team to help you make decisions about the solution. Even if you disagree, listening, acknowledging, and respecting will build loyalty and acceptance within the process.