Customer Relationships: The Key Ingredient

Part 4 Focusing on the Customer: Marketing Growth Strategies

PowerPoint Presentation by Charlie Cook The University of West Alabama
Copyright 2006 Thomson Business & Professional Publishing. All rights reserved.

What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
A marketing strategy of maximizing shareholder value through winning, growing, and keeping the right customers

Focus of CRM
Customers rather than products Changes in processes, systems, and culture All channels and media involved in the marketing effort, from the Internet to field sales
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Sources of the Next Sale

Exhibit 13.1
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Components of Customer Satisfaction

Key Elements of Customer Satisfaction:
Basic benefits of the product or service
The elements customers expect all competitors to deliver

General support services, such as customer assistance

A recovery process for counteracting customers bad experiences

Extraordinary services that excel in meeting customers preferences and make the product or service seem customized

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Extraordinary Service: Customer Loyalty

Ways to Provide Extraordinary Service:
Naming names (personalized attention), valued 10 times more on the worthy of loyalty scale Custom care in giving the customers what they want on an individual basis

Keeping in touch to let customers know that youre taking time to think about them; they dont forget it
Boo-boo researchtaking the time to reach out to lost customers to learn why they went elsewhere and let them know that you want them back

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Handling Customer Complaints

Advantages of Small Firms in Dealing with Customer Complaints
Deal directly with issues as they arise Easier to give customers attention and respect Employees are more empowered to resolve complaints

Learning about Customer Service Concerns

Direct personal observation Feedback forms from customers Monitoring customer service communications

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Using Technology to Support Customer Relationship Management

Telephone Contacts

Online Shopping

CRM Software
Customer Relations Customer Support

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Simplified Model of Consumer Behavior

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Stage 4

Exhibit 13.5
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Understanding Psychological Influences on Customers

Needs
Are the starting point for all behavior.
Categories of needs: physiological, social, psychological, and spiritual

Are seldom completely or permanently satisfied (e.g., daily newspaper). Function together (e.g., the desire for status clothing). Consumers may purchase the same product to satisfy different needs (e.g., Internet access).

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Understanding Psychological Influences on Customers (contd.)

Perceptions
The individual processes that give meaning to the stimuli confronting consumers
Whatever is perceived depends on the characteristics of both the stimulus and the perceiver.

Perceptual Categorization
The process of grouping similar things so as to manage huge quantities of incoming stimuli
Creates a barrier (i.e., brand loyalty) to competing brands

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