By Charlie Brown
IN the brand-driven environment of modern commerce, no strategy affects your business more than how relationships are managed.
In my experience, customer-relationship management (CRM) has three essential components.
- Setting a vision for your relationship network. Think about Amazon.com, Patagonia and Airbnb’s relationships with their customers. Amazon is all about connecting people with the information and vendors they need. Patagonia fosters a community of like-minded consumers. Airbnb blurs the line between provider and consumer to encourage personal connections.
Airbnb is particularly instructive. Its business model—an online marketplace for peer-to-peer lodging—was already established by services like HomeAway and VRBO. But Airbnb surpassed both of them by encouraging hosts and guests to form genuine relationships.
CRM is a crucial tool for relationship-building, but only if it has a clear goal. Leaders should ask, “What relationships are critical to the success of our business? How do we help grow those relationships into a community?”
- Prioritizing the right relationships. Not every important relationship is about money. Often, the most valuable people in your network are those who are most engaged. For example, eBay’s targeted buyer- and seller-rating system not only rewards engagement over the long term (a more important metric than dollars spent), but also steers buyers toward sellers likely to provide a good customer experience. The network pushes eBay’s most valuable members to the forefront and inspires the newly engaged to follow suit.
- Assigning metrics that measure relationship activity. Most CRM software can track more than just sales actions, yet very few organizations use CRM in this way. How often are customers logging in to your site? Are they creating content and discussing your brand unprompted on social media? How about referring new customers, or contributing to support forums? By combining and correlating metrics like these, it’s possible to measure not just who’s in your community, but how active they are, and whether the community itself is thriving.
When strategically designed, CRM can measure all of these things and, when properly managed, it can provide that most crucial of insights: how important your organization is in people’s lives.
Charlie Brown is the CEO and founder of Context Partners, a design firm.