I am sure, everybody will agree that, managing customers is one of the important tasks for small and medium organisations. 

If you ask any of the owners or management of an SMEs, this will be a typical answer. 

“ SMEs  usually work on shoe string budget, and doesn’t have the privilege to accommodate any buffer exclusively for Customer management”.

But is it true ?  Not necessarily.   Even though some finance is involved in automating the customers touch points , you doesn’t need much of an escalation in your budget.   Rather “Customer management” should be a strategic initiative irrespective of the size of the organisation.   

Its evident from our day to day interactions that, small players manage their customers more intelligently than a big organisation.  for Eg.,  Even though you use Proctor and Gamble prdoucts, your neighbour hood shop keeper who sells the product of P& G will understand you better than the Proctor and Gamble.

Managing customers is not a one time activity, its an on going process though out the customer lifetime.  In order to serve a customer better,

we need to understand their behaviour better, 

we have to understand their spending power better,

we have to understand their preferences better,

We have to understand the satisfaction level each customer on your products / services better,

Also we need to understand our competitor’s “customer Management” strategy.

All these in a continues manner.   

How to monitor or analyse their behaviour pattern, or spending power or their satisfaction ?  This is the biggest question.   

One of the best option is grab and store each details from all customer touch points.   The resources who are facing the customers should clearly understand the organisation strategy, of how we are planning to treat each of the customers.  By empowering your customer touch point resources, you make sure that, you are getting what you desire.

In order to grab, store and analyse these data, you might need an automation tool, (like Winds CRM, a hosted CRM tool, which can be accessed as a Cloud model ). 

You need the whole process on customer management to be sponsored by the top officials of your organisation like, owner, proprietor, Managing Director, Chairman etc, that the whole mechanism can be practiced through the organisation.

Have an effective mechanism to understand the existing customers satisfaction level, and try to understand the level of advocacy a customer can render to your organisation.

In short, to improve and maintain a high degree of customer satisfaction level, the organisations should build and nurture a culture, which focuses on the customers. Organisations also has to build trust among the customers and maintain them through out the customer lifetime.

Re-Engineering Customer process may feel as a new terminology for few readers.   In every organisation, there is a process, which deals with their customers.  Usually its not been attended to because of the ignorance of the topic or because there is no enough mechanism to manage it effectively.   

Customer process starts with your first call to a prospective customer and ends till the Customer life time.  It is very critical for every organisation that, it has a right mix of business generated from new customers as well as from the existing customers.

According to the 2008 Executive Survey by Gartner and Forbes.com, retaining and enhancing relationship with current customers is the number one business issue, followed by attracting new customers.    To re-engineer Customer process effectively, you must have a customer Relationship Management  (CRM) strategy in place.   As a business strategy  CRM will help organisation to reengineer the Customer process to improve the customer experiences .

One of the key to Customer process reengineering is “Customer input”, which has to be captured from different touch points.  It should start from the lead generation stage and usually never ends, because, for an organisation, once a customer is always a customer.

Since the customer input is the key, you should have a clear cut mechanism for entering and analysing the same, for which any good CRM application which suites your requirements will be helpful. Implementing and managing the customer input system effectively will lead you to a more clear insight in to the entire process.

Benefits by  RE-engineering the existing Customer process ?

• It helps you to understand your existing customer management process
• It helps you to understand the behaviour of the existing customers
• It helps you to increase the revenue and profitability
• It helps you to increase the Customer satisfaction level.
• It helps the marketing department to plan and implement effective strategy.
• More insight in to the improvements needed in the customer management process.

Its understood that , Usually the prime objective of the Customer process reengineering will be to improve the customer relationship rather than improved efficiency.

Some tips to implement Customer Re-engineering process in your organisation.

1. Define the objective of the process re-engineering

2. Define the methodology on how to achieve the objective. Like implementing on-demand CRM in your organisation

3. Define, how the said methodology will help solve the issues or opportunities facing the organisation.

4. Prepare a document, with what will happen if Customer reengineering is not implemented - (the do-nothing scenario ).

5. Define, what will be the money / People and time involved in the process-reengineering.

6. Present it to the Top Executive and make them sponsor the whole activity.

7. Start implementing step by step

8. Analyse and redefine as per the requirement.

So,  if you feel that you need to re-look your existing Customer process, start today.    You can call us for any professional assistance on Customer Process Re-engineering.  You can also mails us at support@windscrm.com ,  Our team will be there to help you out.