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ID IC: The Crucial Pillar for CRM Mr. Ashish Nasa MBA-IT, IIIT Allahabad

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CRM is about extracting value by delivering value to customers.

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. CRM is as a process that helps bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.
The goal of CRM is that it enables businesses in using technology and people to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers. If we can get our CRM right it can

• Provide better customer service.
• Make call centers more efficient.
• Cross-sell products more effectively.
• Help sales staff close deals faster.
• Simplify marketing and sales processes.
• Discover new customers.
• Increase customer revenues.

IDIC are the four necessary components for an effective & successful CRM strategy that were described by Don peppers and Dr. Martha Rogers in the mid 90's.
IDIC stands for
1. Identify.
2. Differentiate.
3. Interact.
4. Customize.
The idea of IDIC is conceded as the most handy template to design any CRM program. But its simplicity may be misleading and make a simple idea more complex. It has become quite popular in CRM community.

Identify:
You have to know whom you are serving to. The first step is to properly define the customer.

Differentiate:
All customers have specific needs. It's imperative that you have a clear understanding of their individual needs. May be by developing a segmentation scheme that identifies them demographically, attitudinally, financially etc. into small "subsets" of the overall customer base.

Interact:
It means tracking and responding to customers across all touch points. The more the number of channels through a customer can interact with the company the greater need there is for the interaction management strategy because of its complexity.

Customize:
Customize your approach, your products & services you are offering to your customers because each customer has his specific needs that you gather as information at each touch point by interacting with them.

The third I in the IDIC i.e. Interactivity is the most crucial pillar for a CRM strategy.

A well-conceived interaction strategy enables the organization to view each individual customer's behavior over time and to act on noticeable changes swiftly, at the moment when a meaningful response by the organization is likely to have the most impact.

As customer relationships become more complex, interaction management becomes a more difficult task. Interacting means tracking and responding to customers across all touch points, including physical stores, call centers or web. Also in addition to outbound channels such as email, direct mail and catalogs, organizations must coordinate inbound, outbound and event- and behavior-based communications.

Farsighted organizations that need to survive in this era of cutthroat competition now need to be customer - centric, track customer behavior across multiple sources, recognizing opportunities and engaging individual customers in real time. They need to invest in technology that enables highly personalized kind of interaction with the customers.

Practical interactivity requires the following four capabilities: -

1. Tailor interactions in real time: There no "one size fits all" interaction and no "perfect time" to interact with all customers. Organizations require the capability to send customized, relevant information at the moment it's likely to be most meaningful to the customer.

2. Being proactive in identifying opportunities: By combining real-time customer tracking with historical analysis, organizations can predict certain customer behaviors before they occur and generate an alert to the sales force, preventing attrition or creating a cross-sell opportunity.

3. Reacting according to time, events and behavior: Monitoring patterns over time enables customer-centric organizations to detect abnormal patterns of activity or inactivity and trigger an effective marketing message, like what differentiation strategy to apply keeping in view the specific customer need for a product.

4. Conduct "one-to-one" dialogs: Instead of sending the same communication to a broad customer segment or writing business rules for every client, organizations can treat customers as unique and individual, delivering appropriate marketing messages timed for maximum effect.

One more capability could be possible which is of customer intelligence i.e. by knowing the historical behavior of the customer and applying predictive science to it some forward looking views of the customer behavior could be produced.

Today banking sector is facing so much of competition and customers perceive so little difference between banks, so consumer banks have to be more innovative and appreciative users of interactivity management systems. These banks have to differentiate themselves by responding to customer inquires in real time have a tremendous advantage in the marketplace. Having an accurate and complete profile on a customer's financial standing enables banks to render immediate decisions and increase their overall business capacity.

With the use of CRM solutions rising, banks need to build a customer service infrastructure. They can utilize CRM data effectively in areas such as cross selling and measuring multi-channel profitability. Generally, in the banking environment, investments in CRM solutions are made in phases as the need arises. But in future, as competition gets much more intense, every bank will need an effective CRM solution to know its customers. This is not simple. The most daunting task is to analyze how effective each solution is with respect to providing better customer service, which will be possible if it is backed by an efficient interaction with the customers.