Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the measurement of multiple customer related metrics (like Customer Lifetime Value) to help you create, cultivate and continuously improve your customer relationships. It enables the synchronizing of all business functions to focus on producing strategic value for customers, creating enduring relationships that increase sales and profitability.
Pursuing CLM offers 3 key benefits.
The overall scope of a CLM program encompasses all functions or departments of an organization, driving the coordination of data, processes, and value-added services to produce unified, holistic business decisions about customer acquisition and retention. It seeks to eradicate the ‘silo’ thinking within businesses that degrades customer satisfaction and hampers future profits.
CLM is more than a Marketing and Sales ‘CRM’ system. While customer data from a CRM system can be a productive input, a CLM process is a cross-functional tool that supports workflow across the business, removes obstacles and creates a rich information source that can be interrogated in real time. It facilitates a focus on solving problems where ever they occur in the customer lifecycle, and drives improvement in the customer experience where it is needed most. This fosters a stronger collaboration between your team and your customers, supporting current customer needs and goals, while capturing information about future needs earlier.
- Pursuing CLM is a business strategy. Its objective is to increase sales and profitability by synchronizing all business functions around producing value for the customer. It seeks to ensure that each member of your team understands his or her role in producing this value. It encourages your team to think beyond immediate customer satisfaction by capturing information about future customer needs, sharing this with other departments and then collaboratively assessing insights.
- CLM strengthens competitive advantage. With CLM capturing data from customer interactions, Marketing and Sales can build a stronger pipeline of recurring business. Customer intelligence and analytics are enhanced as CLM helps identify patterns, unmet needs, ineffective processes or communications, cost savings or R&D opportunities. Decision making is expedited. The insights provided enable your team to become so responsive and effective that customers learn to rely on you and seek no alternatives.
- CLM simplifies operations. Organizations often have so many overlapping systems and databases, that the customer experience is eroded by delays and inaccuracies. CLM drives a centralization of customer data, simplifying data access and management. Marketing, Sales and Operations all contribute to a single, comprehensive source of customer intelligence data designed to deliver productive and profitable customer outcomes.
Customer Lifecycle Management builds enduring customer relationships and commitment from all stakeholders, increasing the potential to grow sales and sustain profitability over time.
What tools are you using to synchronize your business development and operating functions?
When was the last time you assessed customer satisfaction?
