Once you have identified your customers and differentiated them by their value to your company, your next step, say Peppers and Rogers, is to interact with your customers to learn more about their needs, interests, and priorities. Your major objective in this step is to initiate an ongoing dialogue with your customers through all communication channels available to you including
• Promotional offers.• Collections/invoices.
• Web-site contacts.
• Complaint handling.
• Orders/purchases.
• Customer inquiries.
• Direct sales calls.
• E-mail.
• Faxes.
• Telephone calls (inbound and outbound).
In respect to these and other opportunities you might have to interact with your customer, Peppers and Rogers say you should ask yourself whether your employees are taking advantage of these exchanges to learn more about the customer and his/her particular needs, engage the customer in a dialogue, and use the experience and understanding acquired from the exchanges to develop a stronger and more long-lasting relationship with the customer. They add that during all of these exchanges, you should keep three things in mind:
1.The interaction should be accomplished in a way that minimizes the customer’s inconvenience.
2. The exchange should result in some outcome that has real benefit to the customer.
3. The results of the exchange should influence your company’s specific behavior toward that customer in the future.
Seth Godin adds that you should seek the customer’s permission before attempting to start such a dialogue. In the past, says Godin, when mass marketers communicated with customers or potential customers, they engaged in what could be called “interruption marketing.” They interrupted what the customer was doing—“Now a word from our sponsor”— and asked them to take some action—“Buy Super-Duper Dog Food.” In contrast, CRM insists that you stop interrupting and start asking permission. Godin uses an analogy of getting married to explain the difference:
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1.The interaction should be accomplished in a way that minimizes the customer’s inconvenience.
2. The exchange should result in some outcome that has real benefit to the customer.
3. The results of the exchange should influence your company’s specific behavior toward that customer in the future.
Seth Godin adds that you should seek the customer’s permission before attempting to start such a dialogue. In the past, says Godin, when mass marketers communicated with customers or potential customers, they engaged in what could be called “interruption marketing.” They interrupted what the customer was doing—“Now a word from our sponsor”— and asked them to take some action—“Buy Super-Duper Dog Food.” In contrast, CRM insists that you stop interrupting and start asking permission. Godin uses an analogy of getting married to explain the difference:
The Interruption Marketer buys an extremely expensive suit. New shoes.
Fashionable accessories.Then,working with the best database and marketing
strategists, selects the demographically ideal singles bar.
Walking into the singles bar, the Interruption Marketer marches up to
the nearest person and proposes marriage. If turned down, the Interruption
Marketer repeats this process on every person in the bar.
If the Interruption Marketer comes up empty-handed after spending the
entire evening proposing, it is obvious that the blame should be placed on
the suit and the shoes.The tailor is fired.The strategy expert who picked
the bar is fired.And the Interruption Marketer tries again at a different singles
bar.
If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the way most large marketers look at
the world.They hire an agency They build fancy ads.They “research” the
ideal place to run the ads.They interrupt people and hope that one in a
hundred will go ahead and buy something.Then, when they fail, they fire
their agency! The other way to get married is a lot more fun, a lot more rational,
and a lot more successful. It’s called dating.
A Permission Marketer goes on a date. If it goes well, the two of them
go on another date.And then another. Until, after ten or twelve dates, both
sides can really communicate with each other about their needs and desires.
After twenty dates they meet each other’s families. Finally, after three
or four months of dating, the Permission Marketer proposes marriage.
Permission Marketing is just like dating. It turns strangers into friends
and friends into lifetime customers. Many of the rules of dating apply, and
so do many of the benefits.