Synthesis of: Como asegurar el valor del cliente - Del servicio a la gerencia de clientes

Synthesis of: Como asegurar el valor del cliente - Del servicio a la gerencia de clientes
The chapter is an informative text and is written in an educational style. It is divided into eight sections. The first is the introduction. The second section defines what client management is. The third section explains what the new marketing vision is. The fourth section defines what relational marketing is. The fifth section details what customer relationship management and its key aspects, purpose and limitations. The sixth section explains a methodology for the implementation of client relationship management. The seventh section explains a plan for implementing customer relationship management. The final section is a set of questions for the reader to answer.
The objectives of the text are the following: to differentiate between client management and client service; to define the theoretical concepts and methodologies of client management; to introduce the concept of relational marketing and differentiating it from transactional marketing; and; to analyze CRM as a strategy that supports and facilitates relational marketing.
Several concepts are presented in the text. These are client management, relational marketing and customer relations management. Client management is the set of global and integral strategy oriented towards the anticipation and satisfaction of the needs of the client trying to maintain and consolidate the loyalty, permanence, stability, growth and profitability for the organization. Relational marketing is a strategy that assumes that marketing is a set of relationships, networks and interactions. Customer relations management (CRM) is the management of client relations supported by technological tools to generate value for both clients and business. Some of the objectives of CRM can be: the collection of data; the streamlining of sales force, marketing and customer contact.
The text presents three ideas. The first is a new vision for marketing with a more educated client with more autonomy to make decision with better information than traditional marketing that is more active and dynamic based on the behavior of the client, such as the life cycle of the client. The appropriate strategies should be used for each step in this life cycle. The second idea is about the challenge for business to construction, develop, and consolidate when there are new technologies, different market conditions and clients have distinct realities. The third idea presented in the text is about how to formulate a relational marketing plan. The suggested plan is based on the concepts presented in the text and has the following steps: formulation of the strategy service, definition of the discipline of value, education of internal and external customers, knowing your customer, define the categories of customer relations, meet customers, listen to the customer, direct contact with the customer, visible management for the client, post sale customer tracking, obtaining a customer satisfaction index, benchmarking such as measuring profitability and customer value.
Opinion, Conclusions and Application
Client management can create a more stable customer base by maintaining a long lasting relationship with clients thus bringing stability to a businesses that are first movers when using this strategy. It also creates markets that have high entry standards making it difficult for competitor to enter the market requiring them to focus only on new clients who do not have existing relationships with businesses.
This methodology is a long-term defensive strategy to retain clients. It provides businesses with a foothold and prevents the easy penetration of competitors into its existing client base. Businesses can add value to consumer relationships, with customers who are willing to commit, even though the product may not be service oriented using relational marketing strategies. However, this strategy can only be applied where territory has already been gained through transactional and/or loyalty marketing.
Counter strategy: The fortification of territory is obtained by encouraging cross-sales, developing depth line, relations based on reward, social relations, personalized relationships, financial relations, structural relations and other types of relationships with target audiences. To attack the fortification we attack the above relations, by offering a better relation, or debase the fortification by attacking the underlying product or service, that is, through product differentiation. However this may be more costly than obtaining clients without an existing relationship with a competitor.
The possibility to debasing the fortification leads us to this conclusion:
Do not build forts on unstable ground such as sand.
What does this mean? It means using relational marketing can be dangerous when the underlining product or service is weak and underdeveloped. It is prerequisite that the underlining product or service is strong and well developed for the implementation of customer management to hold market territory reliably.