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Best CRM Practices Require Cultivation of Touch Points
By Debra Taeschler
President of GráficaGroup
December 1999
 While many small and mid-sized agencies are grappling with the basics of integrated marketing, it's not too soon to ask: What's the next big thing?
The next phase of integrated marketing is to develop a network of "touch points" with customers that establish, cultivate, and maintain long-lasting relationships. The answer can be summed up in three letters: C-R-M.
Customer Relationship Management means the responsible acquisition and deployment of knowledge about customers to sell more of a company's products and services more efficiently. CRM is a hot topic because it will advance notions about integrated marketing so agencies will be better able to boost their clients' bottom lines through technologically advanced yet personal methods of cross-selling and up-selling to existing customers.
Explore data channels
Data come in from numerous paths or, as CRM practitioners call them, "touch points." These touch points include the obvious channels in the integrated marketing mixture — advertising, direct marketing, public relations, and interactive — but also include less-than-obvious channels to provide a complete picture of how customers interact with a brand.
For example, consider an electricity supplier that wants to sell efficient heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment to its largest energy users. While traditional advertising and sales channels could make these prospective buyers aware of the offerings, CRM would allow the marketer to target the prospects most likely to buy, and with offers relevant to their situations.
In this case, a full-service CRM agency would rely on robust database technology to bring together the results of additional touch points, including sales calls, billing records, service orders, customer inquiries, satisfaction surveys, and electricity usage of the target company and its competitors. Although this particular industry is subject to regulatory rules that may affect data sharing for marketing purposes, the amount of information a company can know about an individual customer is staggering and makes tailored CRM-based marketing campaigns possible.
The electricity supplier could use this arsenal of information to show a prospective client how its usage costs compare with others in its industry, or to prepare a personalized savings forecast for the upcoming year based on the efficiency of new equipment, including how quickly the equipment will pay for itself in savings.
Perhaps this prospect has asked its sales rep to contact a different individual about related services. If this information is stored in the marketing database, CRM would dictate a specific, well-informed strategy for the account. Rather than calling the main contact, the CRM agency could contact the alternate buyer, leverage the success of the original relationship, and demonstrate bottom-line savings based on individual-level data.
One-to-one for all
In essence, CRM adopts a corner-store approach to customer service, backed by sophisticated database technology.
Some companies may shy away from CRM because bringing together data collected from multiple touch points is no easy or inexpensive task. Instead, they make the same marketing mistakes based on incomplete information that yield lackluster results.
But the risks of not advancing integrated marketing to CRM may prove more costly in the long run.
A recent Coopers & Lybrand survey of 800 companies reported better than 25% improvements among selling capabilities, customer segmentation, target marketing, and customer retention. Couple those findings with the fact that acquiring a new customer costs 10 times more than retaining an existing one and you can see why CRM makes sense, provided you find an agency that knows how to do it.
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