Relationship: The Most Important Word In Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) should create an intuitive and personal experience for your customers. Strong customer relationships have much in common with your “real” relationships with friends and family; if we look at how we maintain those relationships we can use this information when we communicate with our customers.

I THINK I’VE FALLEN OUT WITH KATE…

I want to tell you about my friend Kate; she’s 29, she’s blonde, she’s beautiful and she’s fun to be around. She works really hard as a project manager. Her husband is a teacher and they have two children under 10.

I thought we had a great relationship; I go to a lot of effort to stay in touch with her, even scheduling this up to a month in advance. I always send her a text at 10.30 on a Wednesday (I’ve heard that’s a good time to communicate) and I copy her in an email every month that I send to all of my friends and family. However, I’m a bit worried lately that she doesn’t seem to ever text back.

Okay, this isn’t true; I’m trying to make a point about a common mistake that Marketers make. We often forget the relationship part of CRM. So what is the solution? You can’t go far wrong than following the ‘normal’ rules of everyday relationships. Would you speak to a friend on the same day of the week, every week? Would you always ask them to visit the same restaurant? Would you text them even though they prefer to talk on the phone? Of course you wouldn’t.

Managing customer relationships

We know it is a difficult task to develop a rich (and dare I say profitable) one-to-one relationship when you have thousands of customers. However, for many of our clients we use Adobe Campaign which allows our clients to deliver the right message, at the right time, via the right medium.

Targeted marketing campaigns

Adobe Campaign is the sixth component of the Adobe Marketing Suite; the system is intelligently devised to offer micro-segmentation to marketers for highly personalised and segmented marketing campaigns. The software is specifically designed to optimise campaigns so that they are highly targeted to one specific segment of the market so that specific demographics are marketed to at the right time with the right content.

So although it may be difficult to replicate the spontaneity of a real life relationship with a good friend, it is possible to create a more individual experience for your customers. Putting “relationship” firmly into CRM.