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There are unique challenges for organization whose entire
business model is online. The greatest challenge lies in building
loyal relationships with prospects and customers in a virtual
environment. Relationship management is the key to building
a successful, sustainable online business. Relationship management
does not begin and end with serving up customized content.
Relationship management is about the entire online experience
from beginning to end. From the first site visit to the timely
fulfillment of an order, there are many steps to orchestrate
in providing a high-caliber customer experience and to win
you have to get it right every time! Consistency builds a
trusting relationship.
Online customers make the
decision to purchase and remain loyal based on evaluators
that go much deeper than price differentiation. Customers
demand split second service, customized content, and personalized
attention. Online purchasers also have the ability to comparison
shop competitor products and services in an instant. The business
model must be responsive to customer needs, operationally
efficient, and scalable for unexpected demand.
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.
Click here to read some of our
success stories related to the internet/media industry.
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