Advantage of Applying Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) 顧客關係管理

Boosting Your Competitive Advantage

Customer relationship management is finally coming of age. Like e-business before it, CRM was the subject of considerable hype before businesses took a step back and thought about the benefits and challenges that CRM would bring to the organisation and its effect on the bottom line.

However the concept is now finding widespread acceptance. Industry dynamics, changes to channels to market and new technologies mean that CRM is especially relevant to leasing.

Keep your customers

A major driver of the adoption of CRM techniques is customer loyalty. Loyal customers are more profitable but the costs of customer acquisition are high, so customers may not become profitable for a number of years and happy customers perceive value in the relationship too, so will be less price sensitive.

These points should chime with lessors. Unless they are part of a large banking group on which they can depend for customer leads, the cost of acquiring new lessees is a major expense for most industry players and maximising the value from a customer is vital. Turning the relationship from transactional to value add price is essential in an industry where e-business techniques are threatening to make rate the only differentiator.

One way or another, loyalty is about adding "switching costs" where the service you give is sufficient to create a cost in moving elsewhere. To achieve this you need to understand the customer.

Pick your segment

Not all customers are as profitable, indeed in banking many customers are not profitable. Through market segmentation, CRM offers the possibility of excluding low-profit customers or tailoring products to build loyalty from profitable customers. This means that lessors will be able to incentivise the customers they would rather do business with and exclude or lower service levels to others.

CRM allows lessors to leverage customer information to ascertain which customers are better payers and which will default. As an alternative to cherry picking, lessors may change the business proposition to a non-prime approach by increasing rates and reducing service levels to cover the potential of default.

"Adoption of CRM may be a prerequisite for survival."

....source from http://www.chp.co.uk/news/articles.php?article=3&author=2&publication=