Friday, March 26, 2010

eCRM - how is it different from traditional CRM?

CRM or Customer Relationship Management is:
* understanding your customers needs and wants - so that you are able to customize offerings to them
* understanding your most valuable customers and retaining them; converting the rest to this bucket

Traditional CRM methods like at a retail store can customize only as much. E.g: At a Reliance Fresh outlet or at a Walmart outlet, there can be customization in the form of:
* Separate compartments by 'product type' or 'customer type'
* Coupons to improve loyalty (Points per purchase accumulated over time can be exchanged for purchases or discounts)
All the above are examples of converting a m:n problem where m are the offers and n the customers where m is always less than n.

ECRM differs from traditional CRM from a sheer capability standpoint. Theoretically it is possible in ECRM to have one offer per customer - i.e. 1:1 marketing.
* Based on prior visitor behavior it is possible to dynamically generate a page per customer which is true 1:1 marketing
* While we are yet to reach there, it is still possible to have a i:j solution where i is many times lower than m and j is many times lower than n in the m:n traditional CRM problem