Customer Relationship Management \"What You

Customer Relationship Management

"What you could and could not do to retain and expand existing customers and develop new ones if you did not have access to current information technologies, and what difference it would make"

First, the point must be made clear that the ability to retain and expand a customer base for any business is predicated not on technology, but trust. If a given business is taking steps to earn greater trust by ding what it says it will do, when it says it will do it, for example returning phone calls quickly or replacing broken products, they are going to earn exceptional trust. There is no technology involved in that setting and exceeding of expectations. Rather, it is the decision on the part of the company offering a product or service to deliberately serve their customers with the intent of winning them over and making them loyal.

Without information any company and marketer in the 21st century is at a distinct disadvantage relative to the onslaught of social media-based social CRM platforms and their uses for creating loyalty with customers (Bernoff, Li, 2008). The growing reliance on social networking applications including Facebook and Twitter for service recovery and customer loyalty are also making the distance between the digital haves and have-nots even more broad (Hennig-Thurau, Malthouse, Friege, Gensler, Lobschat, Rangaswamy, Skiera, 2010).

Without all of these digitally-driven approaches to connecting with customers, those companies without the CRM systems to track all these interactions electronically would have to rely on relationships to a an even greater extent than their digitally-enabled counterparts. Allegorically speaking, when a person loses one specific sense their other senses work even hard to compensate for the loss of the function. An organization without technology would have to work extremely hard to make relationships matter with customers, by investing in personal visits, creating events to share insights with, and also developing more effective means for enabling customer loyalty over time (Dagger, O'Brien, 2010). Consider how Harley-Davidson has created an exceptional brand with little reliance on technology and exceptional execution of their events including the annual rides and the mega-event in Sturgis, South Dakota that draws owners and celebrities globally (Schembri, 2009). A lack of technology is not a death-knell to any customer-centered business, but one that makes customer relationships, trust, empathy and transparency all even more critical than they have been before.