[Manic Monday] Using Customer Relationship Management To Engage Your Fans – And Customers

Customer Relationship Management, usually known as CRM, is something that has actually been around for a while, and becoming increasingly scrutinised by businesses planning to expand their consumer-facing business to the next level. It takes the concept of customer service, where usually a customer interacts on a one-to-one basis with an officer of a company tasked with, well, taking care of the customer, employs the scalability of digital technology and deploys it on a larger scale.

Let’s take for instance, a web hosting company. A web hosting company’s customer service team would take various calls and complaints from customers, from questions about signing up to troubleshooting a Linux installation on the co-hosted server. An ideal CRM system would take all this input, assign priorities and difficulty levels to each issue, and direct it to the appropriate response channel. Questions about buying a domain name would be replied automatically by a ‘how-to’ guide, and only the more difficult issues would be directed to actual human officers, hence decreasing the required response load but expanding the capability to receive calls and issues. An ideal CRM system would also open up potential sales leads or deliver relevant marketing information, all based on customer data and activity/purchase history.

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