An integrated and well structured CRM system is critical for successful marketing and customer retention

Over the past five years there has been an explosion in the number of new opportunities

that are available for networking, relationship and community development. Enterprises have been quick to get on to this new global brand wagon that can help create large communities of loyal customers and users. Social networking has opened the doors for a number of new possibilities in marketing, brand growth and customer retention.

Historically there have been many similar attempts. Enterprises have tried to create communities, clubs, loyalty programmes and forums to bring customers together and bind them into a common brand loyalty initiative. Amway pioneered the concept of creating a profitable customer network that uses and promotes their products and shares profits from product sales. Celebrities around the world have fostered fan clubs, many of which have formal registered organizations. The lack of good media and communication kept these initiatives to managable levels and restricted their number.

Electronic media is changing this. Communities can be created at will and without specific charters and missions. They can proliferate and grow rapidly through the use of viral marketing methods, referrals, community expansion and member-get-member programmes. All these communities bring people together and enterprises can gain by participating, sponsoring and infiltrating these communities that can influence opinion and disseminate information.

The challenge for enterprises is the sheervolume of such communities that can number thousands even for specific criteria of interests. Members duplicate across these communities and communications can be dispersed and diluted if not managed well. So far everyone is still exploring this area and the chaos and rapid expansion is keeping everyone busy. The objectives and benefits of this revolution has not been fully understand and internalised by enterprises.

The sooner marketing and CRM teams at enterprises begin working on these initiatives, the more they will be able to leverage them. A good, integrated and well structured CRM system is needed to enable the cohesive and comprehensive management and monitoring of these community initiatives. While services architecture and application programming interfaces still do not exist for several of these systems and websites, CRM systems should be able to integrate and automate some processes such as posting to these communities, storing and analyzing discussions and thoughts, compiling member databases and tracking usage.

As these CRM systems develop and grow, enterprises will be able to structure and implement brand growth, marketing and customer retention programmes at a global level with large impact and interactive, real-time monitoring. They will be able to influence opinion, create visibility and profile for their brands, foster community loyalty and benefits programs and create more binding relationships with customers through common interests.

TheCustomer Relationship Managementsection at Digital Enterprise is working on a resource that will document some of these initiatives and present more information on these possibilities.

An integrated CRM system that can look at bringing these vasts sources of information together and coordinate them for a comprehensive and focussed global customer relationship management and brand growth initiative willempower enterprises and bring them large benefits from the new social media explosion that we are experiencing.

An integrated and well structured CRM system is critical for successful marketing and customer retention

By: Nikhil Narayan

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