Online businesses have a unique
opportunity to manage customer relationships in dynamic and
powerful ways. A large part of a corporate brand today is defined
by the online experience, meaning businesses must provide premium
service during each precious site visit. McFadyen Solutions
is a very seasoned veteran of developing solutions for the management
of customer relationships online.
Some of the tools and strategies
related to a successful Online CRM strategy include:
Profiles/Preferences
Profile information is gathered
and used for the purpose of targeting users or groups of users
by leveraging known and behavior-implied preferences. Profile
information can be used to understand user demographics and
to set up permissions and user classes for personalized content.
Personalization
Web sites with personalization capability leverage profile data to dynamically deliver the most appropriate content to targeted visitors. Web sites with personalization are generally set up in a template format providing for certain fields to be populated dynamically based on the users preferences and/or user class.
Personalized (1-to-1) marketing campaigns have a much larger return on investment than traditional “throw a wide net” marketing campaigns designed to stake claim on market share and “get more eyeballs”. The promotions offered and information provided pinpoints the users personal interests. These personalized campaigns have goals beyond market share, they achieve “customer share”. Customer share is based on repeat business and is achieved through building loyalty by providing the customer with what they need and want to see each time they visit. Personalization marketing is all about building customer relationships for the long-term.
Promotions
Personalized promotions can
also be structured to encourage cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
In the cross-sell situation the customer is encouraged to
purchase add-on products related to the initial purchase.
For example, if a customer purchases skis you offer a promotion
for ski boots. In the up-sell situation the customer is encouraged,
through promotion, to purchase an upgrade to the product they
are interested in. For example, if the customer is shopping
for skis the site serves up a promotion for a higher-grade
of skis that are faster or a better-known, more expensive
brand.
Performance Metrics (Reporting and Analytics)
Performance metrics provide
valuable feedback on marketing, sales, support, and other
campaigns through the web site. Performance metrics help managers
of the web site better understand the segments of web visitors,
better predict which promotions will be the most effective,
and create management reports of vast quantities of data.
Programmed Customer Campaigns (Scenarios)
Programmed customer campaigns
are a sort of time-release capsule of interactions over time,
designed to manage and extend customer relationships. These
campaigns extend beyond a single web session to include the
entire customer lifecycle. Programmed customer campaigns are
carried out across multiple channels, helping organizations
really get under their customer’s skin and figure out
what works best to grow individual customer relationships.
The course of the campaign and successive interactions change
dynamically based on a customer's behavior over time and the
customer’s reaction to specific elements of this planned
marketing program.
Scalability
Web sites must be scalable
to manage increasing numbers of users (a primary goal of any
commercial web site) and to augment services to keep pace
with the continuously changing needs of users. When evaluating
ROI for a large-scale web site, the investment is only as
good as the sites ability to scale to future requirements.
The need to scale to future requirements is a certainty and
today’s investment should lay the groundwork for this
growth. Some qualities of a strong, scalable solution include:
- Scale to practically any combination of machine and processors
- Session-based load-balancing and failover
- Extensive caching to reduce network, database, and file I/O
- Conventional JavaBeans
for scalability and performance, EJB for large, transactional
components
Pervasive/Portable
Successful promotions are
multi-channel. It is important to managers and to users that
information be pervasive and portable. These qualities are
important to managers as they plan multi-channel sales and
marketing campaigns. These qualities are important to users
who demand anytime, anywhere, anyhow access to information.
Anytime, anywhere, anyhow access is both an opportunity and
a challenge for managers. The opportunity lies in the ability
to reach out and build relationships that are multi-dimensional
and that provide deeper insight into customer behaviors and
preferences. The challenge is to keep information up-to-date
and consistent across all channels.
Web Content Management
Internets and intranets have
made many people into publishers. Management of the content
publishing process has become a challenging and critical task.
A typical web site today contains thousands or tens of thousands
of web assets (HTML, GIF, JPG, etc.) and dozens or hundreds
of content creators, editors, and approvers. Special tools
are required to manage the changing inter-relationships (Hyperlinks)
of evolving personalized web sites. The complexity of structure
and difficulty of managing a web site increases in proportion
to the number of content contributors and volume of web assets.
Many companies find themselves “hitting the web wall”
as their business begins to grow and at a time when the need
for a solution to manage content is mission critical.
Privacy
Protecting privacy and managing
issues related to privacy is an important issue when establishing
a public web presence and managing customer relationships.
It is critical to be sensitive to user concerns and to provide
honest information about the use of any implicit or explicit
data collected through the web site and intended uses of that
data with a site-specific privacy statement.
Portal
Enterprise portal solutions
provide integrated functionality above and beyond the traditional
“stovepipe” or point-solution approach of first
generation portals. In early point-solution portals, departments
and processes of the enterprise operated in a segregated manner,
building functionality within the technical infrastructure
independently and on an ad hoc basis. Within point-solution
portals employees may have to visit several internal web sites
to fulfill their job function. This convoluted navigation
of resources is time-consuming, difficult to learn for new
employees, and technically unstable. In this environment,
the portal concept is simply an arrival and departure zone
between fractured business processes for participants in the
enterprise.
To read about some of McFadyen Solutions's successful
online CRM implementations click here.
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