How Leading Companies Achieve Profitability through Accelerating Customer Relationships

Leading companies around the world have implemented strategies for understanding their relationships with their customers, suppliers, partners, stakeholders, stockholders, and channels. In the Electronic Commerce world that is fast emerging, marketshare and product awareness may be tantamount to potential success, but world-class companies have clearly delineated themselves through profitability management. This requires a short and long-term process of managerial enlightenment and action through a customer centric knowledge system. To achieve high profitability in the future, firms will be focused on customer acquisition, customer profitability, customer retention, customer service/satisfaction, and customer individual requirements fulfillment. This session will discuss the strategies and methods utilized by leading firms whose profitability and stockprice have accelerated in these dynamic times of competition and high customer expectations. The most powerful effect of Customer Relationship Management is on the bottom line. Unfortunately, many people see CRM as a technology issue, when in fact it is about economics – profits and business effectiveness. The right technology is essential, of course, but only to serve the ultimate end of developing a more effective business. Otherwise it can wind up, as The Rolling Stones might have put, “telling me more and more, about some useless information, supposed to try my imagination” and contributing little to the bottom line. CRM must provide answers to real businessproblems. The power of information technology is such that it can go on indefinitely documenting such selfevident bits of demographics correlated to behavior, as the fact that few senior citizens buy rap music, when what the company needs to know is why it is losing customers to competitors. The proper use of CRM begins with identifying opportunities that can be achieved – even hiring Art Linkletter for endorsement purposes isn’t going to sell rap music to seniors – and then developing realistic offerings, communications, interactions, and sales orders. Decades ago, department store magnate John Wannamaker made the oft-echoed observation that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but he didn’t know which half. That can be said of many business initiatives, but with modern parallel analytical databases and CRM, it is finally becoming possible to know which “half” is the winner and which the loser. These technologies and a new set of marketing and discovery processes can bring companies much closer to “one-to-one marketing.”