Introduction
Let's imagine the following situation, in which the CEO of a company comments on certain concerns to his Marketing Director in relation to customers (Alet, 1994):
Managing Director: Don't you think, Mr. Martín, that the biggest problem companies have is ignorance and lack of interest in the needs of their customers?
Marketing Director: I don't know, nor do I care.
This situation allows us to reflect on the changes that are coming in the relationship with our clients. Their needs are becoming more sophisticated and they demand more and more personalized attention. This has led us to need new approaches when doing Marketing, much more oriented to cultivating the relationship with customers as individual and differentiated entities.
Already in the 1960s, authors such as Peter Drucker appeared who affirmed that the true business of any company is to make customers, keep them and maximize their profitability.
Relational marketing
Based on this type of reflections, the so-called Relationship Marketing appears, which Alet (1994: 35) defines as “the social and managerial process of establishing and cultivating relationships with clients, creating links with benefits for each of the parties, including vendors, specifiers, distributors and each of the key interlocutors for the maintenance and exploitation of the relationship.
From this approach, the main concern of companies is to retain their customers by generating high levels of satisfaction, without forgetting other concepts such as the recovery of dissatisfied customers.
Loyalty economies
Huete (1997) talks about the creation of Loyalty Economies and is not only concerned with the retention, satisfaction and recovery of clients; It also includes another of the great assets of organizations in the equation: employees. This approach is known as Clienting, and it is highly innovative and inclusive.
In general, the word loyalty is the most used in all these approaches. Huete (1997: 40) states "that if I had to choose a single question to diagnose the health of a business, I would ask the percentage of repeat customers."
But as Huete (1997) affirms, loyalty has two dimensions, one subjective and emotional, and the other observable, measurable and objectifiable. Without the subjective dimension, loyalty becomes impossible. It is essential to emotionally link customers to achieve it and ultimately obtain repeat purchases.
The new consumer
Currently we know some of the general characteristics of the new consumer (Matathia and Salzman, 2000) but this is not enough. We need to increase our knowledge of your individual tastes and preferences. These general characteristics are (Matathia and Salzman, 2000: 32):
1. You are price conscious and look for good value for money
2. You have resources, but you lack time.
3. Understand marketing
4. Adopt fashions and new products quickly but get tired easily
5. It is demanding
6. Has a social conscience
7. You are used to shopping and having access to information (including customer services) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Segmentation and micromarketing
Segmentation techniques are always interesting and allow us to obtain homogeneous groups of customers, in terms of tastes, lifestyles, attitude towards buying… but they may not be enough. Micromarketing or one-to-one marketing can be considered a form of Direct Marketing (Clancy and Shulman, 1994) that appeared in the 90s, with the aim of improving the way of approaching customers in a personalized way.
Evolution towards CRM
This conception of Marketing has evolved into what we commonly call CRM (Customer Relationship Management), which introduces a series of sophisticated Business Intelligence technologies, which help enormously when it comes to generating useful knowledge about the lifestyles and tastes of our customers and in definitive allow us to personalize our offers and make them definitely irresistible…
According to Carrión (2000) when we talk about Business Intelligence, concepts such as Datawarehouse, OLAP and Datamining come to mind. All of them are good examples of tools that can significantly improve an organization's ability to make business decisions.
For Curry and Curry (2002) until recently most companies did not pay attention to the concept of CRM. The reason is that only recently the technologies (Databases, Internet…) capable of monitoring customer behavior and satisfaction have a reasonable cost.
But CRM is not only technology, since it gives us enormously interesting concepts such as the customer pyramid, customer teams, Customer Marketing… that do not need large investments in technology to become a reality.
The CRM model
The CRM is definitely more than just technology applied to the creation of knowledge about the customer.
CRM is a vision of the company that consists of putting the customer at the center of the business model. It is to ensure that the entire organization focuses its efforts on comprehensive customer satisfaction.
Make sure that each contact is used as an opportunity to build loyalty, sell other products and get to know the customer. Normally, companies collect data from their customers, but they do not know how to process it to convert it into knowledge that is a source of competitive advantages. It often happens that the information is scattered and highly heterogeneous.
The idea on which a CRM strategy is centered is to unify all the relevant business information from the appropriate medium (telephone, e-mail, web, fax…).
The success of a CRM model lies in the customer feeling recognized every time they go to the organization.
The information that exists about the client within the company must be unified, since it is needed in a single moment (contact with the client through any channel). Multichannel customers are usually the most profitable.
CRM development areas
The main areas of development of CRM are three:
1. Customer Service (CS) or Customer Service.
2. Sales Force Automation (SFA) or Sales Force Management.
3. Field Service (FS) or Customer Service.
Customer service (CS) includes the management of customer centers, claims management, identification of potential customers…
An automated sales force management enables efficiency improvements and the ideal distribution of tasks between channels. The SFA includes the allocation of accounts, the generation of proposals, the control of future sales…
Customer Service (FS) is developed around the management of visits, management of service orders, control of the service level…
Internet and CRM
The question we are currently facing is how Customer Marketing and the Internet fit together. The answer is e-CRM. For Curry and Curry (2000: 222) the management of customer relationships and the Internet are inseparable issues for two reasons:
1. The Internet helps solve some big, universal problems related to customer relationship management.
2. The Internet makes customer relationship management or CRM a must.
Conclusions
In short, the objective pursued by this type of conception (Relationship Marketing, Micromarketing, CRM, e-CRM,…) is to try to turn the company into the customer's best friend. As Alet (2002: 317) affirms, this “implies a clear attitude of orientation towards who you really want: listen to him, attend him, love him”.
This is not easy, but it is already a strategic priority in many steering committees in our country. The difficulty is marked by the need to generate a cultural change within the organization. Organizations have to be restructured around the customer, but this introduces the need to manage change efficiently. This is the challenge.
Bibliography
Alet, J. (1994), «Relationship Marketing», Gestión 2000, Barcelona
Alet, J. (2002), «Marketingeficaz.com», Gestión 2000, Barcelona
Carrión (2000), «Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management», published on gestiondelconocimiento.com
Clancy, KJ; Shulman, RS (1994), «The Marketing Revolution», Vergara, Argentina
Curry, J.; Curry, A. (2002), «Customer Relationship Management: CRM», Gestión 2000, Barcelona
Huete, LM (1997), «Services & Benefits», Deusto, Madrid
Matathia, I.; Salzman, M. (2000), «Trends. Lifestyles for the new millennium », Planeta, Barcelona.
