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In Accelerating Customer Relationships, a world-renowned CRM expert demonstrates how to build knowledge "infostructures" that deliver breakthrough profitability and customer loyalty. Ronald S. Swift walks you step-by-step through integrating every customer touchpoint: retail, Web, call center, and beyond. Swift covers every aspect of enterprise-wide relationship management -- strategies, processes, partnerships, platforms, software, methodologies, and more. Through practical examples and case studies, Swift demonstrates how to use today's CRM and data warehousing technologies to identify your most profitable customers, find more just like them, and drive unprecedented rates of customer loyalty and profitability. Learn how to build a complete infostructure and Active Data Warehouse to support real-time decision support and marketing -- and discover the key factors associated with a successful CRM deployment. From calculating the economic value of CRM projects to gaining the benefits of profiling without compromising customer privacy, Ronald S. Swift shows how to get the job done -- before your competitors do!
1. Managing Customer Relationships 1:1
Foundations of the Past Drive Our Future. The Major Types of Customers. Who Really Knows Their Customers? Keeping the Customers You Have. How You Serve Your Customers Is a Major Competitive Differentiator. Defining Customer Relationship Management. Some Companies Do CRM Naturally. Targeting Profitable Customers. Positioning Is the Key to Success in Business. Who Owns the Customer? Changes in Customer Positioning. Using Data Better Enables You to Manage Relationships with Your Customers. CRM Is Easy for Small Companies. Large Companies Must Succeed at CRM. CRM Is Not Easy for Many Companies. Costs and Benefits of Relationship Management. Who Is Responsible for CRM? Why This Book Is for You! Are You Ready for CRM? Marketing Communications Strategies. The Power of Relationship Optimization. Management Considerations.
Why Create a Process for CRM? CRM As a "Process"—Not a Project. Major Objectives and Benefits of a CRM Process. From Product Focus to Customer Focus. The Business View of a Marketing Process. The CRM Organization's Structure. Integration of Business, Information, People, Process, and Technology. Successful Excellence: Israel's Pele-Phone. Data Warehouse Requirements Definition. Management Considerations.
The Change from Data to Relationships. Six Key Enterprise Priorities. Four Stages of Knowledge Maturity. Integrating the Business Functions and Info-Structure Provides the Foundation. The Enterprise Opportunity. Preparing for Cultural and Idea Interchanges. The Role of Technology in Driving Customer Retention and Profitability. Enabling Customer Retention and Higher Profits. Who Are Your Customers? CRM Enables Customer Segmentation. Data Data Everywhere. Enabling the New Marketing Litany: The Four Cs. Customer Retention. Knowing the Customer and Using Cross-selling. Enabling Target Marketing. The Importance of Enabling Technologies. The Emergence of Relationship Technologies. Excellence in Business Transformation: Hallmark Cards. Management Considerations.
The World of Learning from Information Itself. The Role of Data Mining. Electronic Commerce. Operationalizing the Customer-Centric Data Warehouse. The Data Mining Process. Using Data Mining and Modeling for Business Problems. Selection Criteria for Data Mining Technologies. Management Considerations.
The Six Stages of Growth. Categorizing Analytical Approaches. The Types of Decision Support. Managing the "Stages of Growth" in Customer-Centric Enterprise Info-Structure Environment. The Info-Structure or Framework. DW Successes from Long-Term Detailed Historical Enterprise Data. Any Question—At Anytime—of Any Data—from Any Level of Business. Mature Data Warehousing and CRM Decision Support. CRM and the Stages of Growth for Customer-Centricity. Management Considerations.
The Proof Is in the Experience. The Planning Phase. The Design and Implementation Phase. Usage, Support and Enhancement Phase. How to Achieve a High Degree of Scalability. Management Considerations.
Defining Your Timeframes and Objectives. Defining a DW Framework and Building a Data Warehouse. Building a Data Warehouse in 100 Days. Phase 1: Analysis & Design. Phase 2: Implementation. Phase 3: Reports, Queries, and Analytical Uses.
Strategic "IT and Business" Enterprise CSFs. Information Infra-Structure CSFs. Guidelines for Success—Knowing Your Providers. Seven Rules for Discussions with CRM Solution Providers. Business Questions and Issues. Information Technology Questions. Business Users' Questions. Red Flags. Management Considerations.
The Need for Data Privacy. Guidelines—The OECD Principles. Online Privacy Alliance. The Emerging “P3P Standard.” European Legislation.The Approach to Privacy in Data Warehousing. Opportunity for Enhanced Customer Relationship Management. Building Privacy into the Data Warehouse. Management Considerations.
Applying the Privacy Policies to a Data Warehouse for CRM. Opportunities for Managing Your Customers. P3P Adoption Scenario: Retail Data Warehouse. Enhanced Personal Data. Potential Marketing Initiatives. Using Privacy Views to Implement Privacy in a CRM Environment.
A New Breed of Decision Support. Knowing Differences—Old World Versus Active Info-Structures. First Generation Implementations—The Refreshment Cycle. Current Generation Data Warehouse Implementations. Learn by Having Very Detailed CRM Data About Customers. The @ctive Data Warehouse Strategy. Web-Based Business Opportunities. Paving the Future for Knowledge Commerce. Coming of Age in the New Age of E-Commerce. E-commerce and E-business. Excellence in Business Transformation: Delta Air Lines Takes Off Using Advanced @ctive Data Warehousing for CRM. Management Considerations.
One-to-One Marketing. Anticipated Results of CRM—Key Assumptions and Verifications. How to Get Your Economics Around CRM. The Payback from Detailed Information and the Cost of Not Having It. Advancing Toward Strategic Economics of CRM. Management Considerations.
Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA). The Eternal Struggle of Business. Strategic Thinking. Data Warehousing and Strategic Thinking. A Rising-Tide Strategy. Data Warehousing and the Strategic Paradox. Data Warehousing and Maneuverability. Management Considerations.
The Financial Services Industry. The Manufacturing and Distribution Industries. The Retail Industry. The Airline and Tourism Industries. The Ground Transportation Industry. The Telecommunications Industry. The Health Insurance Industry. The Entertainment Industry. Management Considerations.
The Oshita Research Project—Focus on Knowledge. Four-Phase Technique for Research in CRM. The Communications Industry—A Review. Research Findings. Understanding Strategic Horizons. Management Considerations.
Corporations that achieve high customer retention and high customer profitability aim for:
The right product (or service),
to the right customer,
at the right price,
at the right time,
through the right channel,
to satisfy the customer's need or desire.
Information Technologyin the form of sophisticated databases fed by electronic commerce, point-of-sale devices, ATMs, and other customer touch pointsis changing the roles of marketing and managing customers. Information and knowledge bases abound and are being leveraged to drive new profitability and manage changing relationships with customers.
The creation of knowledge bases, sometimes called data warehouses or Info-Structures, provides profitable opportunities for business managers to define and analyze their customers' behavior to develop and better manage short- and long-term relationships.
Relationship Technology will become the new norm for the use of information and customer knowledge bases to forge more meaningful relationships. This will be accomplished through advanced technology, processes centered on the customers and channels, as well as methodologies and software combined to affect the behaviors of organizations (internally) and their customers/channels (externally).
We are quickly moving from Information Technology to Relationship Technology. The positive effect will be astounding and highly profitable for those that also foster CRM.
At the turn of the century, merchants and bankers knew their customers; they lived in the same neighborhoods and understood the individual shopping and banking needs of each of their customers. They practiced the purest form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). With mass merchandising and franchising, customer relationships became distant. As the new millennium begins, companies are beginning to leverage IT to return to the CRM principles of the neighborhood store and bank.
The customer should be the primary focus for most organizations. Yet customer information in a form suitable for marketing or management purposes either is not available, or becomes available long after a market opportunity passes, therefore CRM opportunities are lost.
Understanding customers today is accomplished by maintaining and acting on historical and very detailed data, obtained from numerous computing and point-of-contact devices. The data is merged, enriched, and transformed into meaningful information in a specialized database. In a world of powerful computers, personal software applications, and easy-to-use analytical end-user software tools, managers have the power to segment and directly address marketing opportunities through well managed processes and marketing strategies.
This book is written for business executives and managers interested in gaining advantage by using advanced customer information and marketing process techniques. Managers charged with managing and enhancing relationships with their customers will find this book a profitable guide for many years. Many of today's managers are also charged with cutting the cost of sales to increase profitability.
All managers need to identify and focus on those customers who are the most profitable, while, possibly, withdrawing from supporting customers who are unprofitable.
The goal of this book is to help you:
The level of detailed information that companies can build about a single customer now enables them to market through knowledge-based relationships. By defining processes and providing activities, this book will accelerate your CRM "learning curve," and provide an effective framework that will enable your organization to tap into the best practices and experiences of CRM-driven companies (in Chapter 14).
In Chapter 6, you will have the opportunity to learn how to (in less than 100 days) start or advance, your customer database or data warehouse environment.
This book also provides a wider managerial perspective on the implications of obtaining better information about the whole business. The customer-centric knowledge-based info-structure changes the way that companies do business, and it is likely to alter the structure of the organization, the way it is staffed, and, even, how its management and employees behave.
Organizational changes affect the way the marketing department works and the way that it is perceived within the organization. Effective communications with prospects, customers, alliance partners, competitors, the media, and through individualized feedback mechanisms creates a whole new image for marketing and new opportunities for marketing successes.
Chapter 14 provides examples of companies that have transformed their marketing principles into CRM practices and are engaging more and more customers in long-term satisfaction and higher per-customer profitability.
In the title of this book and throughout its pages I have used the phrase "Relationship Technologies" to describe the increasingly sophisticated data warehousing and business intelligence technologies that are helping companies create lasting customer relationships, therefore improving business performance. I want to acknowledge that this phrase was created and protected by NCR Corporation and I use this trademark throughout this book with the company's permission. Special thanks and credit for developing the Relationship Technologies concept goes to Dr. Stephen Emmott of NCR's acclaimed Knowledge Lab in London.
As time marches on, there is an ever-increasing velocity with which we communicate, interact, position, and involve our selves and our customers in relationships.
To increase your Return on Investment (ROI), the right information and relationship technologies are critical for effective Customer Relationship Management. It is now possible to:
This book features many companies using CRM, decision-support, marketing databases, and data-warehousing techniques to achieve a positive ROI, using customer-centric knowledge-bases.
Success begins with understanding the scope and processes involved in true CRM and then initiating appropriate actions to create and move forward into the future. Walking the talk differentiates the perennial ongoing winners. Reinvestment in success generates growth and opportunity.
Success is in our ability to learn from the past, adopt new ideas and actions in the present, and to challenge the future.
Respectfully,
Ronald S. Swift
Dallas, Texas
June 2000