Editorial Articles

All businesses and organisations use a system to track their relationships with their clients, a CRM (Client Relationship Management). This may be as simple as a single piece of paper or spreadsheet, but let’s face it serious businesses have for years been using software based database systems such as Act! or GoldMine. 

As with many things in life the internet has brought new opportunities, challenges and expectations and changed the nature of the relationship with the client.

In all probability we all interact with eCRM’s as clients or customers. If you have shopped online, booked a holiday, flight or hotel online, if you have a social network account or manage your bank account or phone account online then you have interacted with an eCRM.

eCRM systems, if they are good, enhance our customer experience; at the highest level they provide us with a very personal service. Interacting with the eCRM we are encouraged to provide enough ‘data’ about ourselves; name, address, date of birth, interests; which enables the system owner to provide us with the offer of goods, services or information which is tailored to our ‘profile’. The eCRM enables the system owner to provide the right information to the right people. Another benefit of an eCRM is that it allows us as customers to maintain our own data i.e. update our email address or preferences.

Amazon, Tesco and Flybe are obvious examples which use fairly sophisticated eCRM, however there are some others which are more subtle and monitor usage to build up the profile. Spotify, http://www.spotify.co.uk , a free online music provider funded from advertising revenue, requires a minimal amount of data to be entered to open an account but the eCRM behind the system then monitors the tracks selected by the user and the playlists which the user creates to target the user with what the eCRM assumes is appropriate advertising. For example the system would log that a user was building playlists of bands from the 1980’s and then assume that the user was probably aged 40+ and target appropriate advertising. This is a simple example where in fact the algorithms used are far more complex. The aim though is simple, to provide the correct information, goods, services to the correct people. At a very simple level Amazon / Tesco match their offers to customers based on previous purchase patterns. Just consider what the supermarkets know about you and your consumption patterns.

eCRM systems need not be exclusively online, both Tesco Clubcard and Nectar are two very good examples of systems that have both an online and an offline face. Using these eCRM’s the card operators know what you are buying, where you are buying it and when you are buying it. Big brother is watching, I should think that the Government envies the uptake of the cards and would like to emulate it with the proposed ID cards.

The benefits for the eCRM systems’ owners are obvious and multiple. They allow for very quick and very cheap segmentation of their client database which makes marketing and promotion cheaper, more efficient and provide higher returns. For the system owners eCRM’s are relatively inexpensive to maintain and run, as a large proportion of the data is auto collected and a further tranche maintained by the client themselves.

Many not for profit organisations use eCRM systems to manage their membership, an excellent example is the International Bar Association (the global voice of the legal profession) http://www.ibanet.org . When users log into the IBA website content and data is presented to the member based on the information held in the eCRM. So a lawyer who has a particular field of interest is provided with web pages, documents and articles relevant to that field of interest, and they are offered conferences, seminars and publications which are relevant. Using the system the lawyer member can also maintain their own details.

Certainly the customer experience now has high levels of expectation and the standard is set by the large commercial organisations, however the cost of good eCRM systems has substantially fallen and they are now an option for nearly all organisations.

Author: Peter Jackson, Operations Director, e-mango Ltd