What is the state of your Customer Relationships?

           Many businesses these days are on a mission to become customer centric. With customers finally targeted as the ultimate source of short and long-term profitability, the trend is not surprising.

          Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can be an opportunity or a threat and may already be having an effect in your present market without you knowing it.

          The following questions may help a business assess the general state of their customer relationships. It is not by any means a complete overview of CRM but more of a starting point for rediscovering their most valuable assets – customers. 

    1) Is competition heating up in your industry?

              The internet is taking location out of the business equation in many industries. Businesses can now operate efficiently outside their geographic locations.    

Ø    Do your customers want the ability to do business across multiple channels?

Ø    Are you losing customers because your website is not listed in local directories?

  2) Are you competing on price or quality alone?

           Price is always a consideration in the buying experience, but in many cases it’s not what makes or breaks a deal. A product has to be of the acceptable quality necessary to do the job, at an acceptable price and backed up by a high level of service. A high mark in one will not always make up the lack of the other two.

Ø    Are your customers always looking for the lowest price and highest quality products or do they value other components?  

     3) Are you spending more and more on advertising and seeing less and less results?

           The cost of acquiring new customers is rising at a rapid pace. It is now widely recognized that the cost of new customer acquisition can be as much as 6 times higher than selling to your existing ones.

Ø    Are your marketing efforts producing high value customers?

Ø    How long do new customers stay customers?

      4)  Is it just as easy to buy from a competitor as from  you?

           If it is just as easy to deal with one company as it is to deal with another than a certain number of customers will defect to the competition.

  If there is not a good reason to stay, some customers will not. On the other hand if it is easier to deal with you than to start over with another company more customers will stay.

Do you make it easy for a customer to do business with you? How?

Customer intelligence is a process that leverages customer information to create opportunities and recognize threats. It entails developing a clear understanding of customers in general and an organizations specific relationship.