What is Online Customer Management?

Traditional customer management is something you 'do to' the customer whereas modern ie. Online Customer Management is 'done with' the customer.

Technology in the form of interactive software and pervasive Internet is changing the way we manage our customers. The widespread use of information technology (IT) in the contemporary workplace is enabling organizations to draw together technical and industry knowledge, along with skills and expertise, to improve knowledge and understanding of customer needs and requirements.

Online customer management give companies a well-planned and easily integrated e-Business strategy that caters to both the customer needs as well as the corporate needs. Both these need to be adequately catered to in order that company objectives be fulfilled. The net result of implementing online customer management e-Business strategies is satisfied customers and overall productivity.

Why Online Customer Management?

The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. If a business successfully creates and keeps customers in a cost-effective way, it will make a profit while continuing to survive and thrive. If, for any reason, a business fails to attract or sustain a sufficient number of customers, it will experience losses. Too many losses will lead to the demise of the enterprise.

Attracting the right customers with the right offer at the right time is critical to corporate survival. Now, when the number of customers online reached critical mass, the need for integrating customer data stores became an imperative.

The highest goal of online customer management is making sure your organization is keeping customers happy, discovering and solving problems as they come up to produce robust revenue and profits.

Benefits of Online Customer Management :

Online customer management is an extremely valuable asset, no matter what kind of business you have, your relationship with your customers is of primary importance. If you do not have online customer management in place, or are not sure the one you have is right for you, you should consider some of the things it can and should do for you.

1. Stores Information in a Useful Way
One of the most important functions of online customer management system is that it stores information about your customers. This is something that is essential, not only for being able to contact them easily but also for documenting their ordering history. The better you know your customers, the more effectively you can retain their business. Online customer management system allows you to easily retrieve relevant information about your customers.

3. Empowers Customers
online customer management can make your customers feel more empowered than if they simply call in and must be taken by the hand by a salesperson. Online customer management makes customers feel that they are in control of the process when they do business with you.

4. More Efficient Customer Service
Online customer management automates the customer service process while also making it more efficient and user friendly. There is always going to be the need for human interaction of course, but by efficiently automating the system, much time can be saved.

5. Better Communication Within Your Company
As different departments share data, you can work more efficiently as a team, rather than remaining in your isolated units. While every department has its own specialty, it helps your overall business when you understand you are all working towards the same goals. At a more practical, everyday level, you can easily pass information from one part of your organization to another.

6. Increased Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
No matter what your company provides, you have to deliver a good product or service. This is fundamental, and online customer management cannot do this for you. However, in this age of information overload, many people truly value an efficient, user-friendly environment when they order something. So they are far more likely to return to you in the future and recommend you to others if you provide a clear and efficient way to communicate with them and online customer management helps greatly to achieve this goal.

Focus on Building Relationships with Online Customer Management :

Relationships with customers should be ongoing, cooperative, and built for the long term. Organizations who have many transitory relationships with customers consequently have to spend a lot of money on finding new customers. The cost of keeping existing customers is a tiny fraction of the cost of acquiring new customers. Online customer management focus towards same by :

• Understanding and managing the people impact on the culture of the organization.
• Customers being recognized and treated as partners.
• The value of relationship-building being valued.
• Service being seen as a value-adding activity.
• Reward and recognition being based on customer focus ie., 'going the extra mile'
• Corporate support for service activity

With Online Customer Management you Could :

1. Act on every lead and customer
Getting systems in place to organize leads helps the sales team to know who has been contacted and who has not. This ensures that leads do not fall through the cracks and potential leads are not annoyed by multiple contacts.

2. Bring the Focus Back to Selling
Instead of sales representatives using precious time to make endless cold calls and trying to find accounts, the accounts can come to them. More focus is placed on selling the product and making the sale. With everyone online instead of on paper, information is readily accessible and time is left for reps to do what they do best—sell.

3. Find trends in sales
Separate your leads by business type, referrals, occupation, etc. You are able to determine their needs and sell them the right products. When a lead sees that their customer’s needs are being met and cared for, they are more likely to continue in the selling process.

4. Match leads and customers with the right salesperson
Different salespeople have different approaches to how they do business. Some are good with certain types of business and others provide better service working directly with individuals. With a customer management system in place, you are able to route leads to the salesperson who best fits and knows their needs.

5.Analyze sales and forecast for the future
customer management system keeps a history of the entire sales process, from initial contact to closing the sale, including sales history. You are able to work with your reps on how to improve, while making sure customers are taken care of at the same time.

6. Encourage collaboration and teamwork
With customer management system, reps are able to see how they are doing, as well as everyone else. Reps can find and learn about recent deals similar to theirs and work with others on what they can do to improve.

7. Get your sales team face-to-face with leads and customers
With the focus back on selling and not on cold calls, reps will have time to meet personally with leads and customers, developing long lasting relationships that cannot be obtained through e-mail and phone calls. And because all of the information is online and not on a single computer, they can work from anywhere and update information as it happens.

8. Customize the program to fit your needs
It is undeniable that different businesses have different needs, so customer management system allow you to customize the look and feel of the service how you see fit.

9. Monitor interactions at every step
Eliminate the need for lengthy meetings. Every interaction a rep has with a lead can be recorded, so managers can monitor how everyone is doing whenever and wherever you need.

10. Lead and customer information is uniform and comprehensive
The right system can allow you to collect information about your leads and customers and keep everything straight, so you always know how to approach them.

Cloud Computing and Online Customer Management :

Cloud computing is a term referring to scalable, virtualized computing resources available on the Internet. Cloud computing has the following hosting edge of advantage for online customer management :

• Elasticity: Resources can be provisioned and de-provisioned in real time to meet workload demands.
• Utility: Resource usage is provided on a pay-as-you-go basis, as opposed to the traditional approach of incurring the upfront capital expenses and ongoing operational expenses, even if the resources are under-utilized.
• Ubiquity: Services from the cloud are available from the Web, enabling user interfaces that go beyond traditional workstations and include cell phones and other appliances.

In order to achieve the same benefits from CRM as large enterprises, small businesses can employ a cloud strategy to gain all the operational and short-term cost advantages and additional benefits available only through the cloud.

Cloud computing means you don't have to be responsible for the data center. Instead of buying the datacenter, you rent it from cloud. You get all the benefits without the headaches of buying, installing and keeping the system running. All of the firewalls, storage area networks, virtual servers, networking gear etc are all owned, operated and maintained by cloud. Cloud has an excellent track record of service availability. Cloud recorded no unscheduled downtime - even with maintenance the system has been available 99.999% of the time. Security is tight at cloud. Instead of spending millions of dollars on a data center you can purchase cloud by the user with no long-term contracts.