Managing Customer Experience and Relationships. Don Peppers
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Название: Managing Customer Experience and Relationships

Автор: Don Peppers

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Экономика

Серия:

isbn: 9781119815341

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ enterprises are now taking on, treating different customers differently, goes by a number of different labels and buzzwords. Some refer to it as “customer centricity” or “customer engagement.” Others may refer to it as “customer management” or “customer focus.” But no matter what term is used, the central premise is that an enterprise should seek to engage its customers, one at a time, in long-lasting, mutually valuable relationships, based on trust.

      Moreover, to do this successfully, an enterprise must be able to see itself through a customer's own eyes. It must learn how to experience what each different customer experiences, and then take steps to ensure that this experience becomes better, easier, more convenient, and even more enjoyable for the customer, over the lifetime of that customer's relationship with the business. And businesses do this because their managers understand, intuitively, that when a customer has a better experience, the business will be creating more value, which means that the relationship with this customer now has a higher likelihood of increased profitability.

      The dynamics of the customer-enterprise relationship have changed dramatically over time. Customers have always been at the heart of an enterprise's long-term growth strategies, marketing and sales efforts, product development, labor and resource allocation, and overall profitability directives. Historically, enterprises have encouraged the active participation of a sampling of customers in the research and development of their products and services.

      But until recently, enterprises have been structured and managed around the products and services they create and sell. Driven by assembly-line technology, mass media, and mass distribution, which appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Industrial Age was dominated by businesses that sought to mass-produce products and to gain a competitive advantage by manufacturing a product that was perceived by most customers as better than its closest competitor. Product innovation, therefore, was the important key to business success. To increase its overall market share, the twentieth-century enterprise would use mass marketing and mass advertising to reach the greatest number of potential customers.

      The two-way brand, or branded relationship, transforms itself based on the ongoing dialogue between the enterprise and the customer. The branded relationship is “aware” of the customer (giving new meaning to the term brand awareness).

      Companies are realizing that what customers say about them is more important than what the companies say about themselves.

      What does it mean for an enterprise to focus on its customers as the key to competitive advantage? It means creating new shareholder value by deliberately preserving and growing the value of the customer base.

      Once you strip away all the activities that keep everybody busy every day, the goal of every enterprise is simply to get, keep, and grow customers (whether those are business-to-consumer [B2C] customers or enterprise business customers [B2B]). This is true for nonprofits (where the “customers” may be donors or volunteers) as well as for-profits, for small businesses as well as large, for public as well as private enterprises. It is true for hospitals, governments, universities, and other institutions as well. What does it mean for an enterprise to focus on its customers as the key to competitive advantage? Obviously, it does not mean giving up whatever product edge or operational efficiencies might have provided an advantage in the past. It does mean using new strategies, nearly always requiring new technologies, to focus on growing the value of the company by deliberately and strategically growing the value of the customer base.

      To some executives, customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology or software solution that helps track data and information about customers to enable better customer service. Others think of CRM, or one-to-one, as an elaborate marketing or customer service discipline. We even recently heard CRM described as “personalized email.” But it's far more than that.

Get Acquire more customers.
Keep Retain profitable customers longer. Win back profitable customers. Eliminate unprofitable customers.
Grow Upsell additional products in a solution. Cross-sell other products and services. Referrals and word-of-mouth benefits. Reduce the cost to serve customers.