3.01 CRM: How it's changing

To understand how customer relationship management fits into the modern business world, consider a few key characteristics of today's customer-business relationships:

• Customers tend to look at a business as a whole, not the sum of its parts.
  So, despite the number of touch points (interactions between a customer and a business) a customer experiences, both positive and negative, the customer will not usually have “mixed feelings” about a business. S/He will either like it or dislike it.
  
  
• There are now a great number of touch points between customers and businesses taking place online(advertising, shopping, etc.).
  While there are advantages to this trend, such as greater marketing opportunities for businesses and greater purchasing opportunities for customers, there are disadvantages as well. The vastness of the Internet can make it more difficult for businesses to establish and nurture personal relationships with their customers.
  
  
• For a growing number of goods and services, price is no longer a factor in customers' buying decisions.
  Prices have stabilized to the point where a customer can purchase a gallon of gas for about the same amount on one street as s/he can the next street over. The price of gas may go up and down, but competitors’ prices will remain roughly the same.
  
  
• In most cases, today's customers tend to prefer relationship buying to shopping around.
  They want to find businesses they feel comfortable with and stick with them. Although greater access to information can make shopping around easier than it was in the past, customers often don’t want to spend the time or the effort looking for new businesses to deal with—as long as they are satisfied with the businesses they currently patronize.

So, how do these characteristics affect the way businesses approach customer relationship management? Businesses know they have to work harder if they want to create customer loyalty and gain an edge over competitors. Every touch point is critical. Reaching out to customers goes way beyond offering a quality product at a good price. Customers want to establish relationships with businesses. They want to receive special status and extra benefits. Many professionals argue that we no longer live in a service economy—it has shifted to an “experience” economy. Customers want to have a good experience every time they deal with a business. Enter a new concept in CRM—customer experience management. 

Not only do modern customers do a lot of online shopping, many of them like to shop and interact with businesses directly from their phones. For more on these “mobile shoppers,” check out Zach Eberhart’s article “19 Characteristics and Activities of Today’s Mobile Shopper Links to an external site..”