Recent developments in variable colour printing – where content and text can be altered for each document printed – are revolutionising the extent to which communications with existing and potential customers can be personalised.  Recent research from GI Insight has confirmed the close correlation between the personalisation and relevance of customer communications and the levels of customer satisfaction achieved.  So personalised communications and reporting tangibly help to cement and develop customer relationships (and therefore the amount of business done with each customer).  Digital print means that there is now no need for minimum quantities.  And because the technology can now operate at high speed, then the economies of production scale are available to commercial printers to pass on more affordable pricing to customers.

Personalised marketing and customer communications used to be very much a service only for the highest value customer segments.  This is no longer the case.  The economics offered by high-speed variable colour printing mean that even the low value customers can receive such a service.  This is a critical point for the whole theory of database marketing.  Here, the job is not just to identify who the lower and higher value customers are, but also spot the segments with the greatest value growth potential and create strategies to migrate them from a lower value to higher value group.  If we cannot afford to communicate in a personalised fashion with the lower value groups, how can they ever be persuaded to upgrade?

Finally, the new capabilities and economics of variable colour printing are also being harnessed to greater web usage.  Here the process can become very interesting – we know of at least one firm that is using personalised colour to encourage the whole (connected) customer base onto the web, which then encourages the customer to create and use a personalised version of the firm’s website, where they can access all their details online. Throughout this process, targeted additional product advertising is served up to the customer with the aim of increasing their value via product offers they are likely to be interested in.

So much for the new capabilities of communicating in personalised colour.  How should the outcomes of this targeted activity be measured? In order to answer that question we need to examine the key underlying business measurement, which should result from efficient and effective database marketing.

As a result of the Internet, available markets have expanded enormously.  The tiniest firm can now access global markets.  Yet at the same time, the transparency – especially in terms of price – which the Web has allowed has also meant that competition has increased enormously at the same time as national boundaries and local anomalies have disappeared.  Consequently, product differential has diminished and the customer relationship will become virtually the be-all and end-all of a successful ongoing commercial relationship.

This has made business focus on two things:  firstly, to ensure that they provide such a good proposition for customers that they stay, increase their spend (if possible) and become more profitable; secondly, to understand better the cost of winning, keeping and growing customers, so that value is returned to shareholders.

The database marketing industry has produced extremely affordable customer relationship management tools (increasingly on a pay-as-you-go basis), with which to analyse and target the right people with the right offers.  But unless one understands profitability trends at the individual customer level, then companies will not know who to target, why, and with what.

Profit per customer helps to measure the value of different customer groups and the efficiency with which that value is produced.  It reveals whether firms have to recruit twice as many customers to achieve the same profit growth – and therefore whether or not current growth rates are sustainable.  By extension, profit per customer is the final output of earnings minus costs of obtaining, keeping and growing the customer.  Also by association, the quality of the value proposition being put to customers is being measured – i.e. more compelling proposition, greater efficiency, higher profit per customer.

In summary then, new print and web technology capabilities mean that organisations can now affordably generate personalised, high-quality marketing and customer communications. However, none of this is of any use unless a sound, accurate database drives such communications and campaigns.

Contributed by: Yolanda Noble, Chief Executive, dsicmm

Information is expected to be readily accessible online and the boom in comparison sites is testament to this shift in consumer mentality that sees sourcing information and deals as an integral part of the buying cycle.  However, as channels multiply and independent information can be accessed from hundreds of user reviews, websites and blogs, marketers are struggling against their shrinking budgets to secure an authoritative presence for their products and services across the media spectrum.

While there is plenty of evidence of consumer responsiveness on each specific channel and that individuals are very active researching, enquiring and purchasing online, the stages of the customer journey are much cloudier. Exactly how a consumer reaches the online shop or decides to make a telephone purchase is yet unexplored territory.

Mapping the itinerary that led the individual customer to making a purchase or filling a basket and then abandoning it can make a world of difference to a business trying to contain marketing costs. As budgets are squeezed it becomes crucial to only invest in what actually makes an impact and not waste budget on ineffective communications.

For example a customer receiving a solus piece of direct mail featuring a personal URL printed on it in the customary form of www.domainname.com/name, might be tempted from the microsite to the main website and finally make a purchase. Someone else on the other hand might click through the targeted selection of items on the personalised website but choose to order them via the telephone.

It is obvious of course that given the current economical climate, endlessly multiplying the channels to the customer in a bid to keep up with the latest developments from social networks to tweets, will hemorrhage resources. Marketers need to focus on understanding how consumers use different channels for different purposes and leverage real customer preferences.

Although UK consumers make a massive use of text messaging evidence tells us that this is not regarded as a welcome promotional medium and commercial communications via SMS are still largely shunned. SMS, in fact, owes most of its unpopularity to the untargeted batch-messages that consumers have been subjected to. By delivering messages right into the handbags and pockets of people, mobile is perceived as very intrusive medium. This is why a high level of personalisation and time-sensitivity become absolutely essential.

The new-breed of channels offer exciting and unprecedented time-sensitivity. Rather than simply processing regular campaigns to customers in a batch fashion, some organizations have started to leveraging their database marketing systems to target offers at customers only when they behave in a particular way.  These ‘event triggers’ – which might include a customer service call, a type of transaction or going through a spending level in a particular period – instruct the system to send a targeted offer to the customer in a reduced time frame ranging from the same week to the same day, depending on time-sensitivity and marketing medium used.

Recent CDMS research set about analysing the different uplift rates of various media against a solus direct mail piece with a postal response mechanism and found that in all cases, the addition of extra response media to the customer journey was felt to produce a significant uplift.

Among the most interesting findings it is worth noting that by adding alternative response channel uplift varies from 12% (SMS) to 21% (Freephone) and personalised URLs (19%) produce a remarkably higher response uplift than non-personalised Websites (14%).

Overall UK marketers are becoming more capable in the way they communicate with customers and prospects, but keeping up with consumers is a difficult task. At a first glance it seems to follow that as consumers are better connected than ever before, the more media an organisation employs, the more response they will get. However simply expanding the channel choice without making any real effort to personalise the campaign and tailor it to customer preference will simply result in a waste of resources and irritated customers.

Written by Richard Higginbotham, Marketing Manager, CDMS
For more information, contact CDMS by visiting www.cdms.co.uk.

While the importance of getting targeted communications out of the door has achieved mainstream awareness, there is still considerable potential for improved return on investment from CRM systems.

Too often, companies are compromising when it comes to communicating with customers and prospects. The lack of attention to the actual delivery of personalised messages to customers or enquirers is making a nonsense of many companies’ marketing strategies.

Arguably, the need for sophisticated mail has never been greater. Customer retention has become a major issue, with today’s multi-channel environment making it easier than ever for consumers to switch brand allegiance. Consumers are acutely aware that the balance of power has shifted in their favour. It is an accepted mantra that attracting new customers costs more than retaining existing customers, and suppliers operate knowing that bad service, or even perceived bad service, is more likely to be met with defection.

Today, businesses of every size are realising that intelligent marketing to existing customers can have a profound impact on customer retention and customer growth. High volume prospecting activity has given way to tailored, targeted communications to existing customers – the first line of attack in the battle to stem customer churn rates.

Building a relationship with the customer via the mailstream, therefore, is becoming an integral part of any business proposition. You need to make sure there are solid IT management systems in place first, however.

To maximise the effectiveness of these customer communications, it is necessary to integrate them with the appropriate business processes they connect with, however disparate these processes may seem to be.

It is the integration of key business processes and their related information streams into CRM that defines and drives Customer Communication Management (CCM). CCM harnesses the power of specific business processes and ties them to the CRM initiative – in order to create, develop, manage, and maintain more effective customer communications.

CRM is fundamentally customer facing and outwardly focused. CCM takes this to the next level, by capturing the external customer information and linking it to internal business processes in order to create a more comprehensive picture of the customer’s behaviour in relation to the company. The goal is then to stay in repeated contact with customers via a continuing stream of out-bound messages that are highly targeted to individual needs and structured to facilitate easy payment or customer action.

But, with so much channel-choice available, is mail still a viable channel? Undeniably, yes. The EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, in tandem with local telephone privacy laws, places increasing limitations on unsolicited prospecting. Mail, however, is often seen as a non-intrusive and valued means of communication by both businesses and consumers. What’s more, response figures remain steady.

Any fears about email displacing mail have long since been dispelled. Contrary to popular belief, Internet users receive more mail than non-Internet users and the difference between the two groups is growing. The claim that a wired household is ripe for substitution is unfounded. Wired households include attractive consumers who will continue to receive mail along with other media from businesses eager to get a greater share of their wallets.

CCM can uncover opportunities for lower costs and higher revenues both by developing customer relationships that are more rewarding in every sense and by streamlining business processes so they are less costly, more integrated and more effective. Put simply, CCM is directly focused on determining the best and most cost-effective way for engaging in a continual and profitable dialogue with your customers.

Sophisticated data collection and analysis techniques are not enough. Businesses must ensure that this sophistication translates to customer-facing documents if the full value of the mail channel is to be realised.

Article written by David Jefferies, Marketing Director Pitney Bowes

Given the current climate, many companies are focused on maximizing their existing resources. Salesforce.com Administrators often times play an instrumental role in boosting company productivity and increasing the bottom line. Based upon daily interactions with Salesforce customers over the past few years, below are several tangible ways Admins are making a difference:

1. Sales Efficiency Salesforce Admins often serve as a Business Analyst, interfacing with key business units and understanding their processes. The Admin knows how to translate these processes, particularly as they evolve, into Salesforce. Results can include capturing, routing and tracking all incoming leads and ensuring cross-functional teams interact seamlessly. For example, many companies are currently asking their Customer Support reps to identify new revenue opportunities. An Admin, serving as a liaison between the two groups, ensures all leads identified by Support are properly captured in Salesforce and automatically routed to the appropriate Sales Reps. Lead follow-up and pipeline are tracked in real-time analytics resulting in a closed-loop process.

2. Delivering Analytics Data analytics are often times the driver for key business decisions and strategic direction. Understanding both the business and Salesforce functionality, Admins deliver key metrics to management via customized reports and dashboards. They can create real-time reports and period snapshots for valuable metrics to include: best selling products, top producers, stalled opportunities, lead follow up and marketing ROI.

3. Cost-Effective Marketing Salesforce’s mass-email functionality offers companies a cost-efficient way to reach prospects and existing customers. If your company has the Campaigns functionality, your Admin can create HTML emails, pull the correct target audience and track ROI. Many Admins are also familiar with various Marketing applications on the AppExchange, which offer additional functionality such as tracking customer click-throughs and managing bounce backs.

4. Boost User Adoption As the Salesforce champion, your Admin generates enthusiasm within the user community, resulting in higher adoption and ultimately accurate metrics for management.

5. Subject Matter Expert Salesforce Admins typically serve as the “go-to” for questions related to the application and also train new users. The result is consistent use, accurate data and again accurate metrics.

6. Monitoring New Solutions Salesforce.com’s AppExchange is constantly adding new applications which add value to and seamlessly integrate with Salesforce. Admins monitor these new options (including many free apps) to improve production and visibility.

7. Control Spending An Admin monitors the current number of active salesforce users compared to total licenses purchased, to ensure your company is not paying for any additional unnecessary licenses.

As you can see, there are a number of ways Salesforce Admins contribute directly to revenue production and cost-savings. Hopefully the above may have triggered some ideas to use within your own organization. To hear how companies in your particular industry are leveraging their Admins, feel free to contact us to learn more.

Some call center products are bundled with these tools but most are weak or non-existent. This is where a dedicated solution that provides things like individual customer scorecards, detailed support metrics, and other key metrics that give managers needed insight into their call center team. As we learn more about these requirements and business needs, we start to notice companies like call-center-metrics.com pop up to fulfill these business needs.

Being a call center manager, it’s very important to understand overall customer service efficiency so you can improve your internal operations as well as reward your employees based on their performance. Say, for example one of your call center employees does a great job and you’re unaware of this deed. A post call survey for the customer would be able to provide an opportunity to give this feedback, hence later rewarding the employee.

All things set aside, call center metrics are very important and a necessity in all businesses. If you don’t have anything currently in place, I recommend checking out these trial versions and seeing for yourself. I personally haven’t used them yet but based on what I’ve read thus far, they could be a great solution for you.

If you have any other suggestions or comments about general call center metrics and how you currently measure them, please let us know!

AIMpromote is an on-demand web-based software application to manage the handling of sales leads. It is essentially a CRM, but is focused particularly on handling leads. There is also the ability to sell leads (lead aggregation business). AIMpromote takes a different approach and focuses more on lead management which for some, is plenty. If you check out their crm features, you’ll see most of them are in the sales lead management section which is great when it comes to lead management.

I have yet to sign-up for their trial but when it comes to sales management software, I’d consider evaluating AIMpromote along with other traditional players. Since they are relatively new and they don’t mention the price on their website, I’d first give them a call to find out more details. Based on the screenshots and feature page, it’s hard to decide if it’s worth the investment without knowing more information. Regardless, for a pure lead management solution they might be the exact solution you’re looking for.

The summit will offer attendees information and seminars on hot topics in the world of customer relationship management today, including:

• The creation and measurement of critical business processes in marketing, sales and service.
• Emerging capabilities and best practices in the contact center, field and e-commerce channels.
• The collection, management and use of customer data.
• The impact of on-demand and outsourcing on the provision of IT solutions.
• The disruptive innovations that enterprises need to start planning for now.

The CRM summit is an opportunity for discussion and networking opportunities with analysts and guest speakers, executives and leaders from technology providers in the CRM arena, and other CRM professionals.

In an industry with as much rapid growth and change as customer relationship management, the chance to share with and learn from other CRM professionals is valuable. Gartner, a provider of research and analysis on the IT industry, describes the event as offering “offers marketing, sales, and service decision makers independent; realistic understanding of how their business strategies will be influenced by, and can take advantage of, the evolution of IT.”

Keynotes and guest speakers include:

• Chip Conley, Founder, President and CEO, Joie de Vivre Hospitality: Peak – How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow
• Dan Gilbert, Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University: Stumbling on Happiness
• Ed Thompson, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner: Improving the Customer Experience
• 2008 Customer Awards & Users Choice Award Finalists Presentations

More topics include data integration and analysis, systems architecture and business process alignment, and vendor selection and negotiation strategies.

Another Gartner event will be held immediately following the CRM Summit. Gartner’s Business Process Management Summit, Sept. 10-12, will focus on “creating and sustaining an agile process-powered organization and explains how to align business strategy and IT to maximize operational agility, providing new opportunities to expand revenues and productivity.”

Keynotes for the BPM Summit include:

• David Osborne, Author & Senior Partner, The Public Strategies Group: Beyond Bureaucracy: Transforming Government in an Era of Permanent Fiscal Crisis
• Dan Roam, Author & Founder, Digital Roam Inc: The Back of the Napkin: Solving BPM problems with Pictures
• Sara Roberts, CEO and President, Roberts Golden Consulting: Organizational Change Management 2.0: Transforming Your Organization for Innovation
• Janelle B. Hill, Research VP, Gartner & Michele Cantara, Research VP, Gartner: BPM: Transforming Your Business
• Yvonne Genovese, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner: User Interaction and Empowerment Disrupts Business Application Transformation
• Daryl C. Plummer, Managing VP & Gartner Fellow, Gartner: BPM and SOA: When Grand Plans Collide, Chaos Ensues

Nearly 35 companies will be exhibiting sponsors at the two summits.

Customer relationship management is an always-evolving industry, and today’s surge of CRM software options is driving growth in staffing needs, too.

In a tightening economy, customer relations have become ever more important—hence the increase of careers based around building, protecting and cultivating relationships with customers for businesses in nearly every sector.

According to a recent study by GI Insight, most top corporations based in the United Kingdom have appointed a head of CRM. Including positions that also encompass other titles, such as customer services director or marketing director, brings the total up to 48 percent.

“CRM is now a universally accepted concept amongst marketers,” says Andy Wood, managing director of GI Insight. “Since one-off CRM technology costs can be written off and ongoing senior people costs cannot, a company that puts CRM into the title of one of its senior managers is making a real statement of commitment to CRM. CRM initiatives have been taken, hard bottom-line results measured, and ongoing metrics put in place, before CRM management is afforded senior status.”

So what are these positions, and what sort of training or background do they require?

One position falls under the heading “customer experience.” Growing from a “buzzword” only a few years ago to an integral part of most companies, customer experience centers around putting customers’ needs and wants in the foreground. The customer experience manager or similar position is one that some industry experts expect to play an increasingly important role.

“It is a fashionable title at the moment, but as the economy starts to tighten it will become a lot more fashionable,” said Joe Slavin, chief executive of Fish4 who heads up Fish4jobs. “When you’re growing as quick as companies have been over the past five years you don’t have to think too much about the customer because if you lose one then you just go out and get another. But as the economy starts to slow down and bite harder for business it is more important now than ever that the customer relationship is catered to. You have to keep customers happy.”

Customer analytics is another CRM career opportunity. A forecast last year predicted 2008 would bring a shortage of skills in analytics, according to managing vice president Scott Nelson at the Gartner CRM Summit. Analytics skills cover a variety including the assimilation, cleansing and organization of customer information, as well as the “strategic” skills to put that information to good use. It’s unlikely that one person will have skills that encompass all of those areas.

“Just five or six years ago we were doing 360-degree views of the customer and we thought we had our hands full getting all that information from the enterprise and making it useful to someone to service the customer,” says Bruce Culbert, founding principal and managing director of BPT Partners, CEO of iSymmetry and all-round CRM expert. “Now there is 10 times more information outside the enterprise about the customer and the ability to tap this information that you didn’t obtain yourself is bizarre. There is more information out there than there ever was and the challenge is finding value in that information and making it actionable.”

“If I was going to school again, analytics is definitely an area I’d study!” Slavin adds.

Internal branding offers yet more CRM-based opportunities. There’s a growing demand for a position that ensures customers receive a “consistent company experience.” Many corporations employ an internal brand manager, with more expected to follow.

“Internal branding is an issue for every company I work with and CEOs understand how important it is,” says author, speaker and consultant Steve Yastrow. “But at the same time, they don’t know what to do about it and they have nobody to delegate it to except the training department. And that is not enough. One of the great untapped opportunities is to clarify and reinforce the internal brand.”

These titles and positions aren’t truly new, but more roles are emerging as the CRM industry becomes a more and more integral part of business culture.

“New jobs are emerging in this area, and emerging quickly,” says Culbert. “You have demand for social media specialists, who have similar qualities to marketers or editors, but they are the folks who do internal blogs or report on blogs. There are interaction engineers – someone who engineers multiple touchpoint interaction. I was on a panel the other week and I was introduced to a social tag expert. His job is to do experimentation on social tagging, identifying what people are interested in by their social tags and enabling the delivery of more contextually appropriate messaging.”

1. Audit Your Customer Database – Before you even begin to weigh your CRM software options, you need to organize your customer database. Ensure that every file is located in a central place. Then, you should have an administrative team comb over the details. Customer information should be updated, which may be time consuming. However, it is absolutely necessary for a successful CRM install.
2. Prepare Your Employees – Again, your new system will fall apart and cost you major money if you aren’t organized. Invest some time in training your employees to gather the proper customer information and file it according to the newly audited system. CRM should be enterprise-wide and not left up to one department.
3. Closely Compare Software Prices – Don’t just make a few inquiries when it comes to purchasing your CRM software. You need to really scrutinize how much each system will cost your company in the next several years. Be sure to ask vendors what each system offers in the way of features, as well. You don’t want to purchase something on the cheap that can’t handle your customer volume and CRM needs.

Implementing a successful and affordable CRM program starts months before you even choose the software. Remember, the technology is only part of the system. Once you have determined exactly what you want from the new CRM department, you must then prepare for the software. A company that hastily jumps into an expensive CRM endeavor will not only hemorrhage money, it will fail to see any positive changes with customer relations.

By-line:

Heather Johnson is a freelance business, finance and economics writer, as well as a regular contributor at Business Credit Cards, a site for best business credit cards and best business credit card offers. Heather welcomes comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address: heatherjohnson2323 [at] gmail [dot] com .