Customer Relationship Management, a malagasy point of view

It has been a long time since I talked about customers and service excellence and something caught my attention in the newspaper last week. It was an advertising made a local company about the CRM Sage software within the framework of an exhibition at the “Palais des Sports”.

For those who are quite new with the acronym CRM, it simply means “Customer Relationship Management”

The advert took half a page of the main newspapers of the capital and it was addressed to director of sales, sales representative and in my own opinion, the advertising was totally inappropriate. Indeed, the advert was pretending the following if you are using Sage CRM software (they even took the time to put an asterisk next to CRM to elaborate on the meaning of the acronym): “do you want to increase your sales substantially? Do you want to a tool that will help you to target your sales? Do you want to turn your customer care into a revenue center? (that means a department that usually generates revenue, contrarily to a department that generates costs like customer care since it does not sell anything in concrete but assist, and here I am rephrasing the point of view of the advertiser).

What do you think is odd and strange in what I am telling you above? They NEVER refer to the customer at any one point. Isn’t it strange indeed? And the worst of it all is that they are making the point that CRM means Customer Relationship Management but they only talk about how much money you can make and the advantages of using the software to the point of view of a director of sales.

As it is stated clearly in the CRM, we have to build a relationship with our guests in order to understand our customers, to respond better to customers’ needs and more importantly to sell something that meet their needs and exceeds their expectations. It is time for all of us to realize that the use of CRM is to know our customers even more so that we offer to them services that are personalized (and that is the heart of CRM, use of database in order to personalize our products), a product tailored to their needs. The sales process nowadays focus firstly on the customers and their needs before we can even think to make a lot of money. Furthermore, contrarily to what they pretend that Customer care is a cost center and that it needs to be turned into revenue center, Customer care creates a relationship with your clients, it helps the company to assist the customer in order to show that we care about their well being and not just their money, customer care is a powerful tool that creates loyalty. The customers, indeed, will know we are there and we CARE about them as a person and not about the money that they might have.

For that reason, that is why in other parts of the world, services are great because competitive and efficient companies take time to focus on customers (and that is why CRM was created because we want to serve the customer better), on people (the employee that deliver and sell the services; indeed, only the employees that are feeling motivated can sell with a passion and heart), on quality (without quality, there is no need to talk about making a lot of money) and lastly profit (once we are committed to the 3 aspects above, the profit follows automatically). In other words, these four terms are known as the BALANCE SCORECARD, an american approach to management.

So, chaps! Let’s try to focus on our customers before we focus on ourselves.