The Five Engines Of eCRM :
Companies understand that Electronic Customer Relationship Marketing (eCRM) has significant potential. To achieve this, they need to have a comprehensive software platform of five engines that together enable the eCRM business process. These five engines are:
- The Customer-centric Information Store: To consolidate information about millions of customers together with preferences, permissions, and information that may be useful to them.
- The Analysis and Segmentation Engine: To leverage this customer information to build a business campaign strategy and evaluate its success.
- The Personalization Engine: To personalize the entire customer experience, configuring unique sets of messages and offers to each customer.
- The Broadcast Engine: To proactively deliver information and offers to every customer via the media of his or her choice.
- The Transaction Engine: To facilitate the interactions between customer and the company, either exchanging information or driving transactions.
Properly configured, these five engines collectively form a robust, scalable, and flexible platform for eCRM. Prefabricated and custom-made software can be seamlessly integrated into the platform to provide a virtual shopkeeper to millions of customers. Equipped with such infrastructure, companies can continually create significant customer value at Internet speed, automating the who, what, when, where, and how of sales and marketing.
Details –
Engine 1: The Customer-centric Information Store
eCRM initiatives depend on a 360-degree customer view. A Customer-centric Information Store integrates data from disparate information sources such as web sites, transactional systems, operational databases, call centers, enterprise resource planning systems, and third party data. This engine enables companies to recognize and respond accurately to customers, whether they purchase products through a physical store; telephone a call center; or browse a web site. Consequences of an incomplete customer view are often harsh. Presenting customers with inappropriate offers that dilute loyalty and trust stall eCRM efforts.
Developing a Customer-centric Information Store requires large-scale integration of disparate data from multiple sources. Three factors are critical to its success: Scalability, Flexibility, High Performance.
Engine 2: The Analysis And Segmentation Engine
Building trusted customer relationships depends on accurate customer segmentation. The Analysis and Segmentation Engine performs business analysis, segmentation, and prediction so that customer interactions take place in an appropriate and personalized manner. Without this engine, eCRM lacks the intelligence to be effective–even if it has massive volumes of customer-centric information. There are three major categories of analysis and segmentation techniques: Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), Data Mining, and Statistics.
Engine 3: The Personalization Engine- New technology makes it possible to personalize products and services for large numbers of customers in a cost-effective manner by lowering the marginal cost of personalization. Today, every Amazon.com customer gets personal recommendations for books–in large part due to Amazon’s personalization technology. The addition of thousands of customers to Amazon’s base has a minimal marginal effect on their cost to sustain this high level of service. This “scalable” personalization is unprecedented in business history.
Engine 4: The Broadcast Engine
Continuous customer interaction and value exchange require 24/7 access to customers. While the web is becoming increasingly pervasive, few customers are on-line all day. However, they are increasingly reachable through other communication devices. A recent META Group study projects that the average number of communication devices per consumer will quadruple in the next three years.
Growing appetite for non web communication is not just a consumer phenomenon, but a business shift, as well. Corporate use of wireless technology is increasing dramatically. Successful eCRM requires an engine that reaches millions of customers wherever they are: at home, via phone, or TV set-top box; at work; via e-mail; or on the road, via WAP phone or pager. A scalable Broadcast Engine that is built on an open architecture and supports all communication devices enables this level of customer interaction.
Engine 5: The Transaction Engine
An effective Transaction Engine promotes information exchange between every customer and the enterprise. Like the small town shopkeeper who often conversed with his customers and remembered significant details, the Transaction Engine maintains customer contact and transmits information to the Customer-centric Information Store for later use. Leveraging the other four eCRM Engines, the Transaction Engine develops informed lifelong customer relationships.
The Transaction Engine facilitates the value exchange and provides a single interface to any set of information sources. The Transaction Engine also acts as a third-party purchase facilitator for the consumer. The consumer provides relevant preferences via any device and the Transaction Engine vends the relevant information. Smart consumers want trustworthy product information before every potential purchase. To gain confidence in their product purchases, customers will interact with many vendors to gather information, conduct comparative analysis, and then decide which products to buy. The Transaction Engine promotes and ultimately brokers customer transactions.
The Transaction Engine manages the flow of information and services through each customer device and provides appropriate value-added features and functionality. This is achieved by integrating closely with the Broadcasting and Personalization Engines.