Management of the client relationship

The management of the client relationship (shortened GRC) is the translation of the English Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which constitutes new a Paradigme in the field of the Marketing.

The purpose of the GRC is to create and to maintain a mutually beneficial relation between a company and its customer S. In this mode commercial relations, the Entreprise sticks the fidelity of the customer by offering a quality of service to him which it would not find elsewhere.

The image often employed to illustrate this concept is that of the relation between a small shopkeeper and his customers. The fidelity of the latter is rewarded, because the tradesman knows their waitings and is able to answer and to anticipate them it (as a baker who puts side to you a rod cooked according to your preference and makes you credit).

The GRC recovers part of the older concepts of SFA for Sales Forces Automation (automation of the sales force).

Software of GRC

The object of the implementation of such a policy often passes, in the companies of intermediate size and important, by the installation of a software solution. The goal is to make advantageous each interaction between the company and the customer; and this at the time of all the stages: prospection, sale, after sales.

This software covers thus the whole of the functionalities

Marketing (ex: to provide to the professionals marketing tools of targeting, management of campaigns marketing, targeting and segmentation of customers, operational management of campaigns and events, detection of sale appropriatenesses, direct step of telemarketing and E-marketing);
sale (ex: to provide to the representatives management tools contacts, opportunities, tenders);
, customer service (ex: to provide to the customer services management tools complaints, requests for services, supports on line).

It is important to mention that the use of acronym GRC is prohibited in Canada, this one referring to the G.R.C., the Canadian Royal Gendarmerie. Term CRM thus remains applicable in French and English.

Relational marketing versus compromise marketing

The management of the client relationship is an essential component of relational marketing. It introduces certain ruptures compared to the compromise marketing, intrusive and centered on the offer.

Compromise marketing develops:

the product;
the act of purchase;
moment of the transaction (frequency, récence);
the amount of the transaction.

Relational marketing develops:

the relation with the customer;
duration of the relation;
personalization (concept one to one );
“memory” of the contacts between the customer and the company;
the Development of consumer loyalty;
the value of the purchases present and future.

Marketing customer develops:

the capital of the individual

Listed information

The development of such relations implies a knowledge customers. On a company scale, that requires a certain infrastructure of information management which one often indicates like the Information system marketing. This one is articulated around a Database in which one stores all the contacts between the company and the customers. Ideally, these contacts include all the communications bound for the customer (proven or potential):

mailing;
telemarketing;
sending of sample;
etc

like all the reactions of the customer

acts of purchases;
information request;
call to the after-sales service;
etc

In addition to this behavioral information, the database will be able to include/understand socio-demographic information such as:

age;
sex;
many children;
birth date;
socioprofessional category;
nationality;
etc

as well as data on its preferences:

centers of interest;
mode of preferred contact.

The whole of these data is exploited through tools of dated mining, which starting from modeling S statistics, carry out a segmentation of the customers of the company. Tools of GRC make it possible to control the commercial effort and marketing of the company (design and planning of the campaigns). According to the theory of the GRC, the customer grants so that the company collects and stores these information because they allow the personalization of the service which is offered to him.

IT solution

The computer tools of GRC are generally declined around three axes of the line of business: marketing, commercial and customer service. Solution providers GRC generally propose independent modules, resting all on the same database:

the automation of the activities of marketing of the company (or Enterprise Marketing Automation ) allows the planning and the automation of the campaigns of Prospection or Fidélisation. The EMMA modules proposed make it possible automatically to generate a personalized action started by an event (ex: sending of a mail of welcome following a subscription) or according to a programmed action (example: telephone revival following a countryside). The application is able to manage complex rules of management in order to optimize the effectiveness of the Interaction S with the customer (ex: maximum number of request over a given period, generation of samples of population test or witness, etc).

the automation of the commercial assumption of responsibility of the customer brings to the commercial teams all relevant information to meet the customer requirements in Real-time (ex: exposure to the campaigns, reactions, history of order, etc)

the support of the customer service (or Customer Service Support ) makes it possible to bring to the customer an optimum service by making profitable the “base of knowledge” relating to it (ex: the SAV has in real-time information concerning the products which you use and possible preceding requests).

In addition to these operational dimensions, solutions GRC often propose an analytical module making it possible to drill the database for purposes of modeling (ex: segmentation customer). Although one employs today frequently term GRC (or its equivalent English CRM) to indicate the continuations Progiciel S bringing the functionalities necessary to the concretization of this new approach, the management of the client relationship is not limited to the implementation of an IT solution but implies a revolution in the culture of company.

The market of the GRC

The GRC knew a great passion at the end of the Années 1990 and the companies proposing of the tools allowing the implementation of this concept knew an exponential growth. One counts today (2007) in France and in Quebec nearly a hundred software package of CRM available for the small and medium-size companies or the large companies.

Since its beginnings, the market seems to mark time because many these projects, whose initial costs were very important, did not bring the awaited benefit. One currently directs towards a bringing together with the market of the integrated business packages as tender offer to Oracle on Peoplesoft and Siebel or the arrival testifies some on this market of SAP.

Various solutions in lodged mode (ASP or PHP) are available. However, this mode of application represents at end 2006 less than 20% of the worldwide market of solutions CRM. This market should however increase in the years to come with the orientation taken by large editors towards this mode from distribution.

To note nevertheless that these lodged solutions have four principal constraints:

impossibility of reaching the GRC in the event of interruption of the access to Internet
difficulties to integrate the GRC with other trades applications of the company (ERP, EAI…)
dependence with respect to the company which lodges the solution (bankruptcy, stop of the service…)
required to ensure the data confidentiality stored by the shelterer.

Certain actors start nevertheless to think that it is unrealistic to seek to manage the relation with its customers or prospective customers without also managing the relations with its partners, distributers, actors of lobbying, presses, paid,… and a new concept currently develops in the companies: XRM.

Zh-yue: 顧客關係管理

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