5.5. Taking It to Your Customers
It is now time to take your program outside and deliver it to the customers you've targeted.
PHASE 4—DELIVER THE OFFER TO THE CUSTOMER
For the target customer audience, register them for personal web sites, offer information and access about your new online support capability, or run a one-to-one campaign.
5.5.1. The Process to Take It to Your Customers
Use everything that you've developed for this project (information, process, technology and people) to deliver a successful offer. The steps to get the offer out the door and into the arms of your customers are outlined in Table 5-4.
| Step | Purpose | Participants |
|---|---|---|
| Design the offer | Maximize offer return on investment Optimize expected responses | Business Offer Sponsor and/or manager |
| Prepare the offer message(s) | Develop message that matches each segment value proposition Prepare to measure results | Depends on offer:
Project team Business Offer Sponsor IT Department |
| Present the offer | Install new capability, and train customer to use it; release marketing communication Minimize cost of offer delivery | Depends on offer:
Project team Business Offer Sponsor IT Department |
| Transition: Measure Results | Evaluate performance metrics Evaluate value metrics | Project Team |
We will take a closer look at segmentation in Chapter 17 and delivering the offer to customers in Chapter 18. We'll learn about the tools that support these efforts and introduce several resources referencing some of the excellent work that has been done on analyzing customer information, segmenting and valuing customers, and delivering personalized customer experiences on and off the web.
5.5.2. What You'll Get
This is where you should really see the result of your efforts in terms of increased loyalty and business benefit. Measuring results is critical (another way to keep support for the project). I hope you defined the expected customer result at the beginning of the project. If there was no planned customer benefit, then (dare I say it again) it's not CRM! Sales rep productivity is a fine objective, but if it's not aimed at benefiting the customer, it's not CRM.
5.5.3. Transition: Evaluate Results
Along with measuring the performance impact of your changes on customer relationship and business results, you must assess changes to strategy or customer expectations as a result of this project. A key element of the success of your overall CRM program depends on learning from what has gone before and using all the experience and information you've gained to refine your methods going forward. This will feed back into the beginning of the methodology, where you will revisit your strategy and priorities, and test that there are no major changes resulting from the overall business direction or your previous efforts. Then you will begin the process again. Obviously, you won't spend another four to six weeks in the strategy-setting phase, but it's important to review where you thought you were headed and make any adjustments that are necessary.