顧客關係管理 與 營業部 CRM & Sale Department

How do you recommend customer service and sales work together to build trust, while still making maximum sales? I'm always cautious about overselling or overpitching our customers and losing trust that way.

That's a great question and that perfectly captures the dilemma that most businesses have between maximizing short-term sales and maximizing long-term customer value, because both forms of value are important to the company. It's important to generate sales today, but it's also important to preserve the productive capacity of your customer base, not to oversell. It's sort of like farming. If you planted the richest cash crop on every acre of your land every year, pretty soon you'd burn your land out and you'd have to find new land. Well, you can think of your customer like a farmer thinks of his land. Instead of doing that, practice conservation. Reinvest in the land. Rotate the crops. That's what a farmer would do.

For a business person, what you have to do is balance the long-term value of the customer against the short-term sales. What Martha and I suggest is that if you have the analytics to measure customer lifetime value, then one of the things you really need to do is to try to get a handle on what the leading indicators of lifetime value change are. So if customer satisfaction goes up a point, how much is that worth in terms of lifetime value? And that way you can tell what value you actually create from some measured improvement in customer satisfaction. However, in most businesses, that level of analytics is very difficult to achieve, and in any case, it's kind of hard to use that as a tool in the ranks of the call center rep or sales person.

So we have a shortcut. And the shortcut is: always try to earn the trust of the customer. Ask yourself, what would you like if you were the customer? Obviously you're not going to give the product away at a loss, and as a customer you wouldn't reasonably expect a company to do that. Still, what would you consider to be fair if you were the customer? So that's what you do. If a customer is willing to buy something, but you, being a little more expert in the area, know that it's not really right for the customer, even though he's willing to buy it, talk to him about it, and counsel him about what his best interests are, and how his best interests are served. This is a very important point. By doing this, you would be giving up a short-term opportunity to take the customer's money, but you would be earning something of great value in the form of his trust in your advice and judgment. He'll come back! Not only that, he'll recommend friends and colleagues to you as well.

That's exactly the way United Services Automobile Association (USAA) has created the most respected and trusted brand in financial services in the United States. And USAA is the most trusted brand in financial servcies not just by a small margin, but by a BIG margin. USAA members can tell stories about how they were ready to buy more insurance than they needed when the rep said "you know you don't really need that much" or some similar story. USAA operates by the mantra among its employees: "Treat the customer the way you'd like to be treated if you were the customer." That is something that in philosophy is called the principle of reciprocity. In Christianity it's the golden rule. Every major religion has some form of the principle of reciprocity at work. And it is the ultimate in you-orientation instead of me-orientation. It is, also, the most efficient way to earn another person's trust.

Now, if a customer trusts you more and more, he's going to want to buy from you more. If he always thinks that when he deals with you, you're acting in his interests, he's going to want to deal with you more. Forrester did a survey in the financial services area of 6,000 North American households and found that this kind of customer advocacy, being seen by the customer as a company that will act in the customer's own interests, is the number one determinate of customers' willingness to buy again or buy more products from the company. And that just makes very logical sense.

In terms of getting customer service and sales to work together, in most businesses we divide those functional areas. Customer service is kind of after sales, and sales is responsible for sort of getting the customer in the door. There's going to be no substitute for a comprehensive culture change at a company so everybody understands that the primary goal of our business is to do what's in the customer's best interest. Whenever you're solving a problem, wrestling with a dilemma, if there's an immediate selling situation with multiple choice options, ask yourself the question, if I were the customer, what would I consider to be the right thing here? What would I want to happen? And if you do that, nine times out of ten, that's going to give you the best combination of both short-term sales and long-term value creation for the customer.

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CRM management 顧客關係管理層需知

The CRM 顧客關係管理 management 管理層 topics section provides resources for CRM leaders and practitioners and includes the latest information on how to create a strategy for evaluating, implementing and measuring ROI on a CRM project.

CRM implementation
The CRM implementation topic section offers comprehensive resources for those preparing for CRM deployment or those in the process of implementing CRM. If you're preparing for an implementation, learn the advantages and disadvantages of CRM technology options and read valuable expert advice to help you formulate a CRM implementation plan, including performing a systems audit. Learn best practices for integration between CRM and ERP or CRM integration for legacy systems. Read news and advice for vertical-specific implementations and hybrid implementations utilizing both on-demand and on-premise CRM. If you're currently implementing CRM technology or you already have, read news, white papers and case studies of successful CRM application implementations and how to get the most from CRM.

CRM industry news
Browse the latest CRM industry news and top headlines of the past year in this topic section. Find articles on CRM vendors, recent acquisitions and software. Get information on the CRM job market. Get Microsoft CRM pricing, SAP CRM overviews, and learn about Oracle's new features for CRM. See how Web 2.0, mobile CRM, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) CRM and other trends are affecting the CRM market. Read about Siebel's latest CRM product and find out which vendors are offering on-demand CRM products. See how Salesforce.com, RightNow Technologies and NetSuite are profiting off of SaaS CRM. Test your knowledge with the top CRM vendors quiz and get up-to-date information on Oracle OpenWorld, Microsoft Convergence and SAP Sapphire.

CRM Return On Investment (ROI)
This is the place for CRM ROI advice and tips on measuring return on investment of a CRM project. Find valuable management resources on how to develop an ROI methodology, determine how to calculate ROI for CRM and locate advice on how to plan for a good return with CRM. Also, learn the definition of ROI-related terms like internal rate of return (IRR), net present value (NPV) and payback.

Software upgrades
Upgrading CRM software can be a complex endeavor. Learn about building a business case for a CRM upgrade and measuring ROI in this topic section. Read advice on choosing a consultant for a CRM upgrade and how to prepare users for the process. Discover how to conduct a CRM system and process audit to decide if the time is right for an upgrade. Find best practices for an upgrade and learn how to handle change management aspects following an upgrade. Read the latest news on CRM product upgrades, vendor consolidation and support costs. In this section you'll also find software demonstrations of new products from top vendors like Siebel, Oracle, SAP, RightNow, NetSuite and Salesforce.com. Learn the benefits of specific vendors, read upgrade case studies and learn tips for upgrading CRM software products from specific vendors. Also discover best practices for upgrading or migrating to Software as a Service (SaaS) or on-demand CRM. Find the resources you need to make the right decisions about upgrading here.

CRM strategy
Use these resources to build a strong CRM strategy. Learn how to start a CRM strategy with the latest news, expert advice and learning tools. Learn how to build and implement a customer-focused strategy for CRM. Get expert advice on developing a customer equity management strategy and learn how to create customer satisfaction survey. Get in-depth information on customer experience management (CEM) and how it differs from CRM. Find out how to conduct a CRM system and process audit. Learn how to measure ROI following a CRM implementation. Get pointers for evaluating your CRM strategy and customer service strategy with the CRM strategy checklist. Listen to podcasts on developing customer strategies, CRM strategies and customer equity strategies. Get tips for optimizing your CRM strategy, shopping for CRM systems and avoiding failure. Get best practices for building a call center strategy.


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